They Thirst (23 page)

And then he looked up.

They were clinging to the rafters like bats.

Maven shrieked and lifted his gun as the bodies began to fall. His shot went wild as something landed on his back and grabbed his hair. He fell to the floor, hearing a hiss very close to his ear. And now all over the building, there were shrieks, cries to God, angered curses, the noise of falling bodies, and gunfire exploding into wood and plaster. A heavy form hit Luis's shoulders and drove him down, slamming his head against the floor. In a red-misted daze he heard Maven babble for mercy and then scream piteously, like a woman. A shotgun blast knocked the rear door off its hinges, and now Zorro's troops were streaming in. Dark figures leaped through the corridor to meet them, and a dozen separate battles raged in the darkness. Gunfire cracked, etching quick, hot veins in the air. Luis, his head pounding, tried to drag himself up off the floor and caught a kick in the ribs; he doubled up, tears blinding him, his fingers searching for the ebony blade. Someone else began to scream, and the scream was echoed all through the building. A body hit Luis and crashed to the floor. Luis heard a moaning sound followed by a strange and terrible . . . sucking. His brain flared,
I don't want to die like this! I don't want to die like. . . .

An icy hand gripped his shoulder and turned him over like he was made of straw. A figure crouched next to him, eyes burning, pinning him to the floor. And then Luis saw that it was Hotshot Zasa, the Homicide lieutenant who'd supposedly been trashed by the Vipers. Relief coursed through him, and he said, "Hotshot?" He wasn't going to die after all, wasn't going to die, wasn't. . .

Hotshot grinned.

The four fangs in his mouth—two protruding from the upper gums and two from the bottom—were yellow and dripping with fluids. The lower fangs curved inward slightly, like fishhooks; the upper ones were slanted toward each other, making a hideously efficient
V.
Hotshot's face glowed white, like the moon; his fingers, skinny and clawlike, dug deep into Luis's flesh to keep him from twisting away.

And now Hotshot was bending forward, the eyes in that terrible face starting to roll up into the head with greedy expectation.

Luis screamed a single word, the word that had carved itself into his brain as if from a red-hot switchblade—
"Vampiro!"

Above him Hotshot cackled and bent forward to his feast. The lower fangs pierced flesh and hooked. Hotshot twisted his head a fraction to hone in better on the flaming river of life that flowed just beneath Luis's chin. Luis's hands came up to push Hotshot's head away, but they moved too late with too little strength. When the
V
of Hotshot's fangs came down, blood spurted across his face. He blinked, shifted his position again, and as if from a great distance Luis heard his blood being sucked, the sound like someone sucking Coca-Cola through a straw or sniffing fine cocaine from a golden spoon. Luis's hands fluttered, one finger digging into the corner of Hotshot's eye. Instantly he heard a voice in his brain, something dreamy and soft—
Lie still, little brother. Lie very still.
Luis's hands fell to the floor like dead birds.

He was beginning to feel cold, really cold, but where Hotshot's lips were pressed against his flesh, an inferno raged. He lay very still while the arctic cold crept through his veins, inch by merciless inch. Winds were rising in his head, deafening him with their shriek. And by the time his jugular vein collapsed, as flat as a gutted worm, Luis was fast asleep.

Gradually the hideous sucking noises that echoed through the many rooms were quiet. But in a few minutes they were replaced by another noise—the sound of bodies being dragged across the floors.

Roach—much younger, but with an agonized madness already fermenting in his brain—pushed open the door.

In the small bedroom with its mustard yellow wallpaper and acrid smells of tobacco smoke and sweat, another stranger was astride his mother, riding her roughly with flesh-smacking thrusts. The man's buttocks and thighs tensed and untensed like the action of a mindless machine. Bev's hands gripped his shoulders, and the man's broad back was gridded with scratches. The bed trembled, springs squealing beneath their combined weight.

There was an empty whiskey bottle at the foot of the bed. Roach moved into the room, bent, and picked it up. He could see Bev's face—blank, drunken, bloated. She seemed to be looking right at him, her eyes lascivious and brimming with invitation. His groin was throbbing that hateful bass drum beat of desire. He lifted the bottle by the neck and stepped forward, already choosing the spot he would strike. As the bottle came down, he heard Bev scream, "NO!" And then it had crashed down not upon the stranger's dark-haired skull but across his right shoulder because he'd twisted with the scream. The bottle broke across a shoulder blade, jagged edges digging into the flesh. The man shrieked, "Goddamn it, you crazy little bas . . ." and then struck out with the back of his hand, hitting the boy across the nose and dropping him to the floor. Roach, blood stringing from his nostrils, scrabbled to his feet and, whining like an animal, rushed forward. The bottle was forgotten now, he was going to kill this man with his hands. The stranger twisted off Bev and drove a solid blow to the boy's chin that lifted him off his feet and then down again like a heap of laundry. "You stay away from me!" the stranger shouted, bending quickly to retrieve the broken bottle. "You stay away or I swear to God I'll kill you!"

Roach started forward again, his beady black eyes as dead as marbles, but then Bev shifted in the bed, and he stopped. Her thighs were exposed, and between them her sex glistened like a gateway to all the pleasures he'd ever imagined in his tortured dreams. He turned toward her, the stranger forgotten now, and approached the bed on trembling legs. Bev's face flushed red. She closed her thighs and pulled the sheet up to her neck. Her son stood at the foot of the bed transfixed, his hand moving in slow circles at his crotch.

"My God," the stranger whispered, droplets of blood tapping to the floor. "My God . . . how long . . . has this been going on . . . ?"

"It's not what you think, Ralph!" she said, avoiding her son's languid gaze. "Please . . . !"

"You . . . and him?" The stranger's eyes moved back and forth between them. "Your own
son?"

"Not long, Ralph . . . I swear to God, not long!"

He saw it all then. "You . . . you like it, don't you? Jesus! You like it with your own son?"

And suddenly it all came bursting out of her before she could stop it, the anger and fear and black guilt that was her legacy to her son. "YES, I LIKE IT!" she shrieked. "I like it when he touches me! Don't you dare look at me like that. . . get out of here! GO ON! GET OUT!"

The man was already struggling into his pants. He grabbed his shirt from the back of a chair and shrugged it on over his injured shoulder.

Bev was screaming now, a high, whiskey scream, "I'm
glad
we do it! He's more of a man at thirteen than you'll
ever be . . . !"

"Sure, sure," he said, working his shoes on. "You're both nuts, aren't you? Christ, I knew
he
was off his rocker, but you, too?"

"GET OOOOOUUUUUUTTTTTT!"

The man paused at the doorway, fumbling with his wallet, and flung a few bills at her. They spun like dead leaves at the boy's feet. "Maybe they'll give you the same room at the nut house," he said and whirled out. A door opened and closed, and then there was silence but for Bev's harsh breathing. She stared at her son, tears beginning to slide down her cheeks. "It don't matter," she said softly. "Not a bit. We've got each other, don't we? We'll always have each other. They don't understand how bad it is to be alone, do they, Waltie? Nothing matters. Come on. Hurry."

And he did.

The bedroom and Bev and the mustard-colored walls rippled like a pond into which a stone has been tossed. The ripples strengthened, moved faster and faster, and suddenly the whole scene vanished as if it had been sucked to the dark depths of a whirlpool.

Roach rubbed his eyes and sat up in bed in his dank apartment. It was still very dark outside, and somewhere jukebox music was playing. He could hear the black cockroaches scrabbling in their cages. He stood up and went to the window, looking down on Coronado Street. Dreaming about his mother made him nervous; sweat had come up on his face. It made him angry, though he couldn't exactly figure why. Perhaps it was because he knew now how much of a liar she was; she
had
left him after all, and because she had, they had sent him off to a place—the Crazyhouse—where people laughed and shrieked all the time, where he had to take pills and drink a lot of water. Something within him needed but hated that need. When he found his mother, as the Master had promised him he would someday, he wouldn't have to fear going back to the Crazyhouse again. Everything would be all right.

He walked across the room to the table on which sat the little cages filled with roaches. Their backs glistened like black armor in the darkness. He picked up a match-book, struck a match, and held it to one of the cages; the roaches scrambled away. When the flame died down to a red pinpoint, he could hear them scurrying back over each other again.

Walter Benefield was dead now. His name was Roach, and it was a name he liked. Ever since he'd gotten the job at Aladdin Exterminators four months before, he'd been studying them in their death agonies when he sprayed Dursban or Diazanon in cracks between floors and walls. Sometimes the roaches would flood out in a strange kind of dance, flopping and running and falling as the chemical began to drown them. Often there would be large, black roaches, the bulls of the nest, that would start to recover and scurry away; they were the ones he would catch by hand and drop into a plastic bag to bring home for his experiments. He was awed by their strength, by their sheer tenacity; very few things could kill a massive, three-inch bull. The diazanon might make them crazy for a little while, but without a good second spray they would recover. Even stomping on them couldn't do it; they played dead for a few seconds and then zipped away with their guts hanging out, like relentless tanks. They were so
fast,
natural survivors that had remained virtually the same for millions of years. Over the months he'd burned them, tried to drown them in the toilet, tried to suffocate them, cooked them in a pot of boiling water, and performed a dozen other experiments in death. Very few things worked. It had just been luck that he'd had a bag of them in his car the night he'd picked up that first girl. After she was dead, he wondered whether the roaches would suffocate inside her mouth, and so he went to work. They had, finally, and he'd been very pleased with himself. Doubly pleased when he realized the papers were calling
him
Roach. It was an honor to him, and so he continued doing it just for fun because the papers and the police seemed to expect it.

Now when he saw himself in a mirror, it seemed he was beginning to look like them. His shoulders were broad and slightly stooped, his hands and forearms as muscular and large as steel clamps; he had the heavy, dark-browed forehead and small black eyes that missed nothing. Once his hair had been black and curly, but when he started working for Aladdin, he cut it very short, right against a large, bulbous skull. Very small ears and jutting, bony elbows completed the image he had of himself—that he was undergoing an evolutionary change, crossing the line between man and insect, becoming stronger and smarter and almost invincible, just like them.

He untaped a corner of the waxed paper that covered one of the cages and reached down inside, grasping a roach between his thumb and forefinger. It got away, and it took him a few more seconds to get another one. Then he pressed the corner back so none of them could escape and, holding the squirming roach inside his balled left hand, he turned on the lights. The overhead fixture, an opaque umbrella of dirty glass, lit the room with a harsh glare that threw the man's huge shadow out around him. He went to the stove, turned on the gas flame, and dangled the roach over it. The insect scrabbled frantically at his fingers. He had the power of life and death over it, just as he did over those girls who were friends of Bev and who laughed at him when they thought he wasn't looking. Oh, he knew how they laughed; he was much smarter than he let on. Some of them he'd seen with Bev before, when he was just a kid and she used to walk the street. They were her friends, and they were hiding her from him.

It used to be he could fix them with his hands and stop them from laughing, but the Master had said that was a waste. The Master wanted them for himself, so he'd told Roach that he should take poisons from where he worked —liquids and powders—and use them on those girls to make them sleep for a while. Roach had taken some of them—Seven dust, V-l, Dursban, Diazanon and a few others—from the stockroom at work late on Saturday night; he knew very little about them except that Mr. Lathrup had warned him to wear his mask when he used them. So he did just that when he mixed the chemicals in bottles on his stove. Then he tore up an old towel and soaked the rags in the solution for a long time, pouring what was left—an oily, brown liquid—into an orange juice bottle which he stored under his sink. The first time he used it was the next Tuesday night, and the Master was very angry at him because the girl was dead when they reached Blackwood Road. After that he cut the mixture twice with water, and it worked just fine.

The roach caught fire. He watched it sizzle and then dropped it into the sink where it writhed and ran around in circles. He turned on the water, and the roach spun down the drain, still kicking.