The Shambling Guide to New York City (6 page)

Had he bitten her? She couldn’t remember, but her neck seemed fine.

Was it true? Could it be true? Vampires and zombies and those weird, horrific men who chowed down on little nocturnal darlings? She’d thought it was cosplay, but by the end of the evening it had been pretty clear something else was going on. Shaking her head, she stuck her hands in the pockets of her pants to remove her valuables before stripping. She found a small folded piece of paper in the front left pocket. Her fingers shook as she peeled it open. In very neat handwriting were the words:
If you are still interested, I’d like to make an offer. Call me. Phil Rand, Underground Publishing.
A phone number followed.

She left the note on her bathroom counter to gather condensation—maybe it would blur the ink and she could pretend she couldn’t read the number—as she finished removing her clothes and stepped into the hot shower. She gasped as the water hit her back, and grudgingly stayed under the too-hot spray, allowing it to melt the rest of the cobwebs in her mind. The zombies had been dropping bits of flesh on the carpet. The vampires—even Phil—had been drinking blood instead of red wine. How had she not noticed that Phil’s wine was so viscous? And those demons and the hedgehogs…

She shampooed furiously, hoping to scrub the images from her mind, but succeeded only in tangling her curly black hair. She tried to focus completely on scrubbing, rinsing, conditioning, shaving, turning the water off, exiting the tub, and toweling dry.

Vampires. Monsters. In the city.

Then it hit her.

She sat down with a thud on the toilet seat, the breath leaving her. Phil was publishing a travel book for monsters. And his coworkers had to be monsters as well.

I guess they were right about my not fitting in.

How would monster tourists view the city? The implications were fascinating. And terrifying. Were the monsters coming here to take over? Devour everyone? The patrons of the restaurant last night hadn’t seemed to have any interest in devouring her, even though they clearly could have. Something nagged at her—Sylvia had asked Phil if he had brought his own vintage that evening. Zoë realized with a sick jolt that the hostess had been talking about her.

She could easily become a personal vintage if she took this job. But if monsters were already here, how was that different from any other day? Why was she in more danger now than she had been last week?

Well, she conceded to herself as she slipped on some jeans and a T-shirt, every day she wasn’t walking knowingly into a vampire lair. She didn’t think she was, anyway. She’d been happy in her ignorant belief that gangs and rapists and serial killers were the greatest threats in the city. She hadn’t considered the living dead, or any other monster, until yesterday.

And was she now considering
working
with them? Really considering? The concept was insane. And yet it still intrigued her. What would they do? How do you write for monsters? She wondered what it paid. If Phil would—or even could—guarantee her safety. And what kind of benefits she’d get.

Zoë exited her building with a frightened lump in her throat. She’d had a small fear of being mugged or raped when she’d
returned to the city, and always carried the pepper spray her mother had given her. But now she had a new fear.

Would pepper spray stop a zombie? A vampire? Those hedgehog-eating demon guys? And if those existed, what else was out there? Werewolves? She had forgotten to check the moon phase on the calendar. Ghosts? She’d have to keep an eye on any cemeteries she passed. Banshees? Now everything about Britney Spears made sense.

Zoë looked at the people on the street, trying to identify each one as human or not. Many didn’t notice, but some returned her gaze with interest, nervousness, or hostility. Plain green eyes, blue eyes, brown eyes looked back at her.

If there were monsters in New York, where did they hide?

She had done some urban exploration in Raleigh, but she had been too young to do any in New York when she had first lived there. She did know there were miles of unused tunnels under the city.

Bet they’re not unused.

She walked on. The city was full of people. Gangs, celebrities, upper-crust society, poor, homeless, artists, clubbers, and the ordinary folks: those just wanting to get by. New Yorkers didn’t look at one another, they didn’t stop to help strangers, and they certainly didn’t ask what time it was. Who knew what could be lurking underneath the overcoats and hats? Who were the ones who walked with their heads down, at a slightly swifter gait? And who came out at night?

Zoë entered the massive front doors of the main branch of the Brooklyn Public Library and sniffed around for an occult section. A pale young man with black hair and a thin face sat behind an information desk. He was helping a college student find a book on elves when Zoë entered the room. It was disappointingly not the dark corner with a musty collection of books
she’d been expecting; it was clean and boring. Why couldn’t there be a happy medium between the horror that was the terrible, unwelcoming bookstore she’d found yesterday and a sterile library?

She smacked herself in the forehead as she realized that the bookstore had been for monsters. They didn’t want to sell to humans.

H. P. Lovecraft had written about dark, forbidding libraries and book rooms; those had books worthy of chronicling monsters.

Had Lovecraft been a fiction writer, or had he been writing the true histories of New England towns? Zoë shook her head:
One mind-blowing item at a time.

When she smacked herself in the head, the librarian turned at the sound.

“You don’t look like you read much occult,” he said, looking her up and down. Zoë was suddenly aware of her lack of wild hair color or facial piercings. “Are you looking for anything in particular?”

“Um. Books on vampires, I guess. And Lovecraft.”

“You know that Lovecraft didn’t write about vampires, right?”

Zoë glared at him. “Yes. I know. Thanks.”

“We have
Twilight
in our young adult section,” he said dismissively, pointing down the hall.

Zoë placed her hands on the desk. The startled librarian sat back. “While I’m sure your patronizing attitude has gotten you quite far in your career in library science, I’d like you to give me the benefit of the doubt and think that perhaps I know that
Twilight
is easily found at a bookstore, and perhaps I am here for a book that is a bit more difficult to find.”

He swallowed and looked at his computer screen, which, Zoë saw, was blank. “Ah. If you want some rare Lovecraft, our
collection is pretty good, but you should check out the library in Red Hook—he lived there for years, you know. Of course, he hated it, but any community will claim someone if they end up being famous. The library’s tiny, but it’s got some amazing texts. What we have here isn’t too shabby, though, so it’s not a bad place to start. To get the authentic stories, you’re going to have to find books that weren’t edited by August—”

Zoë nodded politely for as long as she could stand it, then put up a hand to stop him.

“Really, I just want to start with whatever Lovecraft you have. Just point me to where they are.”

He frowned at the interruption of his display of Lovecraftian history and motioned for her to follow him. He left her unceremoniously in an aisle near the back wall and pointed to a shelf. “Vampires: here. Lovecraft: on that wall. Other undead or otherwise otherworldly monsters are one aisle over. I’ll be at my desk working on a new shelving protocol.”

She nodded to him, and when she didn’t seem impressed with his very important task, he sighed and walked off, his boots sounding poutingly loud.

Zoë perused the books: they focused on vampires in general, Dracula in particular, and vampire hunters. There was a great deal of vampire fiction, vampire comics, and vampire role-playing games. She grabbed several at random and then went to the wall where several Lovecraft collections sat on the shelves, along with many copies of the
Necronomicon
, each by a different author. Zoë added a collection of Lovecraft’s stories and two different copies of the
Necronomicon
to the pile. She carried her stack to the counter and set it in front of the librarian.

He took the top book,
The Dunwich Horror and Others
, from the stack. “Good choice. Why so much interest in Lovecraft and vampires?”

Zoë peered at him closely. He seemed human, but so had Phil and the girl at the bookstore. And that flirty fat guy, John. The librarian stood in a dusty shaft of sunlight, though, so he was probably not a vampire.

“I have heard a lot about Lovecraft,” she said. “I wanted to learn a bit about him. And I’m curious about how different authors treat the vampire myths.”

“Weird focus for a thesis,” he said, scanning the bar codes in the backs of the books.

“It’s not a thesis. I’m not in school. Just interested.”

He shrugged and finished scanning her books and then her card. “Due back in three weeks. Let me know how you liked ‘The Dunwich Horror.’ ”

She nodded at him and stuffed the books in her satchel. Time to do some reading.

Damn, but Lovecraft was dull! Zoë shut
The Dunwich Horror and Others
with a sigh and put it beside her on the couch. She had been able to get through only a few pages. She’d heard her friends in college talk about elder gods Cthulhu and Ithaqua, and the stories had sounded awesome, but she’d never actually sat down to read Lovecraft’s words. The anecdotes had been better than the stories.

She had already looked through several of the vampire books, making notes when they seemed to correspond with—or contradict—what she had observed about Phil. As the books said, he’d seemed to avoid sunlight. But how had he gotten from the bookstore to the publishing offices? He seemed fine with being awake during the day. He drank a glass of chilled blood (Zoë had assumed it was chilled, but she realized with a jolt that it might not have been) instead of needing to drink from a living
victim. And the worst part, he’d enthralled her. Although she’d managed to fight him, at least a little bit.

She looked through the books to find information on people fighting thralls, and could only find information about humans bending entirely to vampires’ wills.

She had little memory. At least she didn’t have a burning need to go to him or be by his side or open a vein for him. She didn’t really want to serve him—beyond the publishing job, of course.

Which still intrigued her. Dammit.

She had to face it. As much as this whole thing scared her, the sheer fact that she had an opportunity to write for these creatures, to see New York City in a way that few humans ever would, was exciting to the point of making her punch-drunk. She picked up
The Dunwich Horror and Others
again and tried to read it not as fiction, but as history. Telling herself she wasn’t supposed to get pleasure out of it made it a little easier to read.

Finally, after getting through the first two parts of the titular story, she slammed the book shut and looked at the clock. Two thirty. Phil would be expecting her call soon. She needed to come up with an answer.

She stood and grabbed her jacket. For once, she needed things to be on her terms. Time to visit Underground Publishing.

Any coterie with business in the city will want to go to the Hell’s Kitchen area first, but avoid the Javits Center, which banned coterie after an unfortunate vampire gathering had a miscommunication with the catering company and many humans died. Your goal is a mere two blocks away. That’s where the Flight of Pigeons meets.

An empty lot on Thirty-Eighth Street is the gathering point for the finest business minds in the city, and they welcome coterie—bearing breadcrumbs in exchange for advice on business-related questions. While not exactly scrying the future for accurate answers (or obscure prophesy), these brilliant birds work together as a hive mind to come up with the best decision.

The incredible usefulness of these birds has caused their section of New York to be deemed neutral territory, and woe to anyone who injures or threatens them.

The decree came after tragedy hit Boston on January 15, 1919. An angry zombie killed fourteen pigeons that were trying to broker a deal between the zombie and her chief business rival. The ensuing destruction done to the city caused all cities to declare the territory of the Flight of Pigeons neutral.

P
hil looked up, startled, when Zoë opened the door to his office. She walked in, sat down on the pink couch, and waited.

“Hello, Zoë,” he said. He glanced at a barefoot woman wearing a light-blue sundress who was standing at his desk. Her skin had a bluish tinge and her hair was pink. “Morgen, we can talk later.”

Morgen, thin and almost childlike with her frizzy hair captured in two ponytails, looked at Zoë with her head cocked. “Is this the human?”

Zoë studied her with equal curiosity. The woman clearly wasn’t a zombie, but didn’t have the gravitas of the vampire.