On a Darkling Plain (20 page)

“What is it?” Lazio asked.

“God help us all, I
do
know,” Elliott replied. He turned and lunged for the phone.

THIRTEEN?
COMRADES

Only solitary men know the full joys of friendship.

— Willa Cather,
Shadows on the Rock.

The narrow streets of the Little Havana district of Miami were crowded, even at two in the morning. Groups of teenagers, many wearing gang colors, strutted along the sidewalks while others, packed into cars whose stereos blared heavy metal or Latin music, cruised slowly up and down. Drug dealers and heavily made-up hookers in miniskirts loitered in shadowy doorways. Open-air stalls and push carts sold crab rolls, hot dogs, paper plates of black beans and rice, beer, Cuban coffee and shoddy plastic toys and trinkets. The warm night air smelled of exhaust, tobacco, alcohol, marijuana and human sweat. Surveying the scene though one of the windows in the rear of the van, Dan said, “This place reminds me of Saigon.”

“You were in Vietnam?” Laurie asked. He nodded. “Were you in combat?”

Dan nodded. In fact, he’d seen a lot of action. Looking back, it was strange to remember just how much it had bothered him to watch people die.

“Of course he was,” said Wyatt, tucking his battery-powered electric razor, with which he’d just removed the stubble sprouting around his mohawk, back in the pocket of his white leather coat. Given the peculiarities of vampire physiology, he probably had to shave the sides of his head at least once a night. “Where do you think he learned to fight like Superman?” He gave Dan a friendly wink.

Dan hadn’t explained to the anarchs that when he’d saved them from the Brujah he’d had an infusion of giants’ blood enhancing his strength. Hoping they wouldn’t expect him to toss around any cars in the future, he turned toward the driver. “Hey, Cassius,” he said, “how are we doing?” “The traffic is hell,” the heavyset black ghoul replied. “Most of the streets keep twisting or dead-ending, or else they’re one-way going the wrong way, and a lot of the signs are either missing or in Spanish. But don’t worry, I
ivill
find the place.”

“You’re having trouble with the Spanish?” said Felipe, the Hispanic vampire with the weight-lifter physique and a liking for gold chains. “You should have said something before.” He rose from the floor of the van and squirmed into the bucket seat beside the Blood-Bound servant.

“Was Vietnam as terrible and as stupid as people say?” Laurie asked, pushing her rose-colored granny glasses back up to the bridge of her nose. “My friends and I protested it.” She blinked. “Oh, jeez, I hope that isn’t going to be a problem between you and me.”

“Of course not,” said Dan. It still felt odd to chat with his own kind companionably, to perceive that another vampire cared whether he liked her. Odd, but nice. “It’s ancient history now. Looking back, I guess the whole thing
was
stupid. It sure didn’t accomplish anything, did it?” “No,” Wyatt said. “It was just another Camarilla fiasco.” Dan cocked his head. “How do you mean?”

“Why do you think you were sent over there?” replied the vampire in white. “The elders of the West have been fighting a slow-motion war with the clans of the Orient for a long time, and you poor bastards were the foot soldiers.

I’m no great bleeding-heart protector of the kine — I’ll worry about my species and let them worry about theirs — but my God, what a pointless waste of human life! It illustrates why the old order has to go.”

Laurie nodded solemnly, the way she §o
_;
,often did when Wyatt preached the anarch gospel.

“So how old are
you,
Wyatt?” Dan asked curiously. “What was going on in the world when you were human?”

“The Revolutionary War,” said the anarch chieftain, a spark of pride glowing in his eyes. “I was one of Francis Marion’s guerrillas. Did you ever hear of him?”

Dan nodded. “The Swamp Fox.”

“Right,” Wyatt said. “I really believed in the ideals
_:
of the Revolution. I had the Declaration of Independence and
Common Sense
down by heart. I thought that after we ran off the redcoats and the Hessians we could turn the colonies into a utopia.

“Then a Ventrue elder seduced me into accepting the Embrace. I guess she saw something in me that convinced her I’d make a useful addition to her brood, and frankly, it wasn’t that hard to sell me on the idea of obtaining immortality.” He smiled wryly. “I wasn’t
entirely
idealistic, you see.

“Anyway, the world of the Kindred took me completely by surprise. Dreamer that I was, I’d believed that vampires, virtual demigods with centuries of accumulated wisdom, must have created a perfect society, an even grander and nobler version of the nation my fellow rebels and I had been striving to build. You can imagine my disgust when 1 discovered the tyranny and cruelty with which the old dominated the young. The never-ending violence and intrigue. The unquestioning acceptance of institutions like torture, the duel, and trial by ordeal, which mortals were coming to abhor as barbaric even in the eighteenth century.

“I never regretted becoming a Kindred — eternal youth is nothing to sneeze at, even in a fascist oligarchy — but I rapidly began to despise my fellow Ventrue. How could 1 not, considering that they’d
created
the Camarilla and were its most fervent supporters? When Salvador Garcia founded the Movement, I ran away to join, and I’ve been fighting for it ever since.”

Wyatt grinned. Once again his revolutionary ardor seemed to give way to a more boyish, even mischievous, zest. “And it’s a pretty cool life! It’s exciting, and you make true friends.” He beamed at the other vampires. Laurie took his hand and squeezed it. Somewhat to his dismay, Dan felt a twinge of affection himself for the youth with the mohawk. “In my sire’s brood, I never had that. Everybody was always stabbing everybody else in the back, jockeying for the old gorgon’s favor.”

“I think we might be getting somewhere,” the driver said.

All the vampires in the back of the van tried to rear up and look out the windshield at the same time, a maneuver which crowded them together. Dan noticed that no one pulled away from him with a reflexive wince or shudder of distaste.

Craning to peer over Laurie’s brunette head, he saw that the character of the streets the Van was traversing had changed. Now the narrow, twisting avenues, scarcely more than alleys, really, were empty, their gutters choked with trash. There were few lights burning, and many of the shops w'ere vacant, with whitewashed or boarded windows. Little Haiti, assuming that the Kindred had indeed reached their destination, was manifestly far less lively and considerably more impoverished than the Cuban immigrant quarter it abutted.

“Can anybody see any house numbers?” the driver asked.

Turning, Dan peered through the window closest to him. A few of the doorways they were passing had had numbers once, but time had largely worn away the paint. In the dark and at a distance, even his newly enhanced vision couldn’t make the numerals out. “Sorry,” he said, “not from here,?’

Rounding a bend, the van encountered the blackened shell of a burned-out convertible which completely blocked the way. The ghoul stamped on the brakes and the panel truck lurched to a stop. “Shit,” he said.

“Don’t worry about it,” Wyatt said, reaching for the handle of the door. “We can hoof it from here. I’m tired of being cooped up, and I think that we might find the place we’re looking for faster that way. You just turn the car around and be ready for a fast getaway.”

“You got it,” Cassius replied.

As the vampires climbed out of the van, Dan smelled a strong odor of combustion. The car obstructing the road had burned only hours ago, and it stank of charred meat as well as singed metal and paint. Moving closer, he felt the heat still radiating from it and saw the two black husks sitting in the front seat. Each had been dusted with pale yellow flower petals and a sprinkling of crimson powder.

“I wonder,” said Dan, “whether these stiffs are still here because nobody called the cops, or because the police won’t come into Little Haiti after dark. Either way, I’m guessing that this isn’t a great neighborhood.”

“I think you’ve got a point,” Laurie said. Peering warily about at the dark alleys and doorways, the heaps of rotting, stinking garbage that shifted and rustled as rats burrowed through them, and the claustrophobic passages that ran between the buildings into impenetrable shadow, she looked more like a timid mortal girl than a predator on humankind. “They say Miami is contested territory. The Camarilla and the Black Hand both claim it. I wonder if these deaths have something to do with that. The petals and the powder make them look like some kind of ritual murders.”

Wyatt put his hand on her shoulder. “Hey,” he said gently, “whatever happened here, it’s got nothing to do with us. We’re going to be fine. We’ll nail the target and be out of town before anybody even knows we’ve been here. I mean, who’s slicker than we are?”

She gave him a game smile. “Nobody.”

“Damn straight.” He brushed a stray strand of her brown hair off her glasses. “So let’s get to it.”

Circling the burned car and its grisly contents, the vampires set off down the street. Everyone, watching not only for street signs and house numbers but any sign of trouble, peered about in a manner that reminded Dan of his old platoon making its way through the jungle.

His fellow Gls had been his last real friends — until the anarchs had made him welcome. Though he’d only known them for a couple of nights, he already felt close to them. Perhaps it was because they’d faced death together. In any case he was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the notion of selling them out.

The Kindred neared an intersection where a street sign, which some vehicle had apparently jumped the curb and run into, leaned drunkenly. Squinting at it, Wyatt read, “Southwest Thirtieth Street. All right, we’re nearly there!” Heading right, the vampires turned the comer. The cross street was as black and empty as the last one.

Why, Dan wondered,
should
he betray his friends? In recent years, he’d become a little too cynical to believe now that the anarch cause would ever actually improve the lot of the common vampire; but on the other hand, he didn’t have anything against it, either. Certainly its dogma was more congenial than the authoritarian strictures of the Camarilla. Nor did he have any particular desire to aid Roger Phillips and his vassals against their enemies. The bastards had certainly never done anything for him!

A chalk drawing, a double circle quadrisected by a cross, with cryptic symbols incised in the four sections, gleamed on a crumbling brick wall ahead. Jimmy Ray, an anarch with a hillbilly twang in his voice and an Elvis haircut, whom Dan had yet to see without his black wraparound sunglasses, muttered uneasily: “More voodoo stuff.”

Dan reflected that he’d undertaken this mission because

Melpomene had promised him a place in vampire society. But now he already had one. Why, then, should he follow through?

Ultimately, he could only think of one reason. He’d given the Methuselah his word. But his infiltration of the anarch cell had required him to pledge his loyalty to them as well. Therefore, he was going to be a liar and a traitor no matter what he did.

He was still mulling over his dilemma when he and his companions came to a doorway sealed with a wrought-iron gate. Beyond the bars was a sort of tunnel that led to a small courtyard with a dry, fungus-spotted fountain in the center. The air inside smelled of cooking, of roast chicken and goat, conch chowder and fried plantains.

Wyatt pointed at the numerals someone had crudely scratched on the wall beside the gate. “Seven ninety-five,” he said. “We’re in business.” He smiled at Dan. “Would you care to open this?”

“Sure,” said Dan. He gripped the gate and pulled. After a moment the lock broke, and the barrier lurched open.

When the vampires skulked into the courtyard, it became apparent that they’d found an apartment complex. Clotheslines ran back and forth between windows and rickety balconies, slicing the square patch of sky at the top of the enclosure into sections. Dan could hear people snoring, and a rhythmic squeak of bedsprings that indicated that somewhere a pair of insomniacs were making love.

“This way, I think,” murmured Wyatt. He led his companions toward a shadowy doorway on the left. Dan wondered if the anarch leader was responding to a bit of psychic inspiration or a more mundane source of information.

The doorway opened on a staircase. As the vampires climbed, the risers flexed beneath their feet. Now the air smelled of dry rot and mice. Dan could hear the rodents and other vermin skittering through hollows in the walls.

At the top of the stairs was a single door. Wyatt stepped up to it, touched his fingertip to the keyhole, closed his eyes, and froze. After a moment, Dan whispered, “What are you doing?”

For another second Wyatt didn’t answer. Then, blinking like a mortal awakening from slumber, he said, “Just trying to see if one of my skeleton keys will fit this. I think it will." He put his hand in the pocket of his white leather coat, paused again and then brought out, not the ring of keys that Dan had been expecting, but a single brass one. He eased it into the lock and twisted it. The bolt disengaged with a click.

“Why didn’t you try a skeleton key on the gate downstairs?” asked Dan.

“Outdoors, I wasn’t as worried about being quiet,” replied Wyatt, grinning, “and hey, with a moose like you around, why should I do all the work? Shall we?” He pushed open the door.

Beyond the threshold was a spacious loft, an artist’s studio redolent with the sharp smell of turpentine, illuminated by the silvery moonlight cascading through the skylight. Canvases stood on easels or, completed, leaned against the walls. Inside another doorway along the left-hand wall, hearts thumped slowly and breath hissed softly in and out of mortal lungs.

“Let’s trash us some art,” said Jimmy Ray, pulling a plastic spray bottle out of his pocket. He sauntered to one of the easels and spritzed down the canvas it held. The harsh tang of the solvent stung Dan’s nose. The paint steamed, bubbled and ran, reducing the picture to a meaningless smudge.