Volume 1: Sucked Dry

Issue Three: Into the Sun

After the landing lesson, Fence and I race through the streets of the city in a Thunderbird he got from god knows where. Every day, he picks me up in a different car, and most nights, he takes me home in a different one as well. We'll be at the end of a lesson, or the Sun will start peaking over the tops of the buildings, and he'll say, “Wait here. I'll be back,” and in moments the city streets are filled with the roar of an engine, the squeal of tires, and there's Fence, careening through a tight corner to pick me up in the automobile du-jour.

“Nice one tonight,” he says as he pulls up in the black convertible, top down. I hop over the door and into the passenger seat.

“Red leather?” I ask proddingly. He just smiles.

“You know, you're the kind of guy my mother told me to look out for.” It's not the first time I've alerted him to that fact.

“S'okay. I'm the kind of guy every mother tells her children to look out for.” It wasn't the first time he'd said that.

Now, with gravity back in control, the wind through my hair is more of a nuisance than a novelty. I try to grab all the loose strands I can and hold them together, but at least a few invariably get away, and I finally give up the whole mess, letting it whip wildly as we go faster, faster down the highway.

“Slow down Fence. Got somewhere to be?”

“It's almost seven.”

“What?” I look down at my watch. Six forty-five. “Motherfucker! I had no clue...”

He points toward the foothills looming in front of us, black silhouettes against the night sky. “Sun's going to be creeping over any minute now. You just haven't seen it. It won't matter if we're a couple of minutes late.”

“Dammit Fence!” I scream, trying to amplify my voice against the roar of the engine and the enraged wind. “You know I owe everything I have—my entire life—to Walter Ponchus. If he gets caught doing this—we're fucked. All of it's fucked. Can't you understand that?”

“I understand, I just don't think you're being realistic. So what if you get in a little late? So what if Ponchus gets caught? He's gotten out of worse jams—you know that from experience. That man can lie his way out of any difficult situation, and he'd have no problem with this.”

“That doesn't mean we should act like what he's doing for us isn't a big deal!”

“Dana, listen. All this training, you have to remember it was sanctioned—don't even start, you know I won't tell you by whom—but what that means is that, for the most part, you and I have carte blanche. I could take you and leave the country and the first guard who decided to tell someone about it would end up either crazy or dead or both, and nobody else would say a word.”

“And I have a problem with that. Just because you and I can do this, just because we have some kind of power, doesn't mean that innocent people need to get hurt to preserve it. Isn't that what you were telling me just a few minutes ago?”

“So,” he chuckles, “is that the lesson you learned from the accident that landed you in the slammer?”

“Fuck you.”

He slows down as we near a hairpin turn; now the Sun is beginning to peek over the tops of the hills, casting an iridescent glow on the dew of the morning world.

“I think you missed the point. I didn't want you to hurt people because I didn't want you causing a scene, not because I believe you have some moral obligation to not to harm to others. I couldn't give two shits about who would have been crushed under the two tons of granite you liberated from the side of that building. What I do care about is having to answer questions.”

“Taking responsibility?”

“Exactly. Dana, we can't risk it. There are already too many people out there who know about the creatures of the All-line. The Hunters—they even want to kill us. You saw that first hand.”

“Yeah, and I also saw what you did to him,” she said, thinking of the night Fence pulled her from the bushes, his jacket and hands slick with blood, an unidentifiable lump no more than five feet from him, thick, red blood spreading like a universe into the grass it sat on.

“He was young. And alone. We aren't invincible Dana. We may be immortal, but we aren't invincible. We can be crippled.”

“I know, I know,” I say flippantly, knowing it. “ 'There are some things worse than death.' “

He looks over from the driver's seat with disgust. “You don't know shit. If you knew what a life worse than death felt like, we wouldn't even be having this conversation. But some day—and I promise you this—you will find out.”

“Sounds like a threat.”

“It isn't, it's a...”

“A promise, yeah yeah, I know. Look, can we just be quiet the rest of the way? I guess part of me is still too human to understand how you could look at people as so expendable, as such...such a liability.”

He nods, cranes his neck to pop it, and concentrates on the road. I lay my head back, and for the first time in a long time, wish I could have a drink. I close my eyes and put my fingers to the left side of my neck, feeling for the two indentions. Perfectly healed, just slightly concave. You couldn't see them at all. You would only notice them if you felt my neck. My reminder. My kiss from Fence.

That first night, when he asked if I wanted to live forever, I told him, “Hell no.” I told him I wasn't even sure if I wanted to live through tomorrow. And his face, his mouth, drew down into a deep frown, an expression of sadness that looked so feigned it was laughable. He couldn't care less about whether I lived or died. And I found it kind of funny. Almost a turn on.

No, Fence was more disappointed that I hadn't said yes because me saying no made me a harder sell. And Fence was not at all interested in playing the salesman this time around, even though vampires are good salesmen. The fucking best. Some of the richest people in the world—vampires. Their cunning, their skill, their love for power—that's what makes these people such good salesmen. Some of them are better than others, of course. Most vampire men work for car dealerships. The really good ones work for used car dealerships. The women—retail. The vampire's curse—the one you inherit once bitten? It's not that you're allergic to sunlight. It isn't that wooden stakes or crosses can end your life. It isn't a lust for love. The vampire's curse is buyer's remorse. Anytime anyone's ever sold you something you didn't want, anytime you've ever regretted buying something from the Home Shopping Network the day after seeing a midnight infomercial—that was probably a vampire selling you that. You've always heard the saying, “It takes a special kind of person to be a” and enter any occupation there. Well, it takes a special kind of person to be a truly gifted salesman. And that kind of person is a vampire.

So when Fence saw that I wasn't just going to come along peacefully, he knew he had work to do. Normally the kind of thing that turns a vampire on, unless that work gets in the way of a much much bigger job. Not really a question I've answered yet.

That first night, Fence asked if I had a place for him to wash off. And when he picked me up with one arm out of that bush and smiled that smile of his, I couldn't wait for him to get back to my place for a wash.

He tells me later, because I don't remember (the last of the vodka had kicked in), that the second I stood up, I collapsed to the ground again and tore a hole in my jeans. My knee bled pretty bad, he said. He said it was all he could do, waiting until getting me back home.

The next morning, I woke up with little knowledge of the night before and a headache that seemed to get less painful by the moment. Hell, I didn't even notice the stains until later that night, when I went to sit on the couch for coffee.

But there on the couch was a large, circular bloodstain. Right where my neck was laying when I woke up, not remembering how I got home or even who I was with the night before. I checked the apartment, but it was...

“Empty,” Fence says, jolting me out of my reminiscence. We've arrived at the warehouse, but Ponchus didn't greet us. And now, Fence is worried. Which is bad. Because Fence never gets worried.

Fence has just come out of the warehouse. He insisted I stay in the car, even though anyone seeing either one of us would spell disaster. “There's no one in there,” he says as he jumps from the ramp to the ground with a 'thud.'

“What? Where's Walter?”

Fence just looks off into the east, watching the rising Sun grow larger by the second.

“If he's not here, something's wrong.”

I open the door to the car, close it gently, and get out to go stand next to Fence. “Hell, I know the way. Can you get me in the door?”

Fence takes off his sunglasses and looks me in the eye. “Honey, if Walter isn't here, it's not because he caught the flu, or had to call in sick because he put his dog to sleep. If Walter ain't here, it's because some shit has gone down.”

And then he says something I'll never forget.

“You think too much. I assume you always have. Stop that shit. It's not worth anything where we're going.”

Then he grabs my hand and leads me up the ramp.

Our footsteps echo in the great, shadowy expanse of the warehouse as he leads me quickly across the concrete floor toward the wall at the other end. We walk for at least thirty seconds before we reach an inconspicuous sheet of the corrugated steel that makes up the wall of this place. Fence takes a few steps back and regards it with what looks like feigned curiosity.

“Fence, what the...”

But before I can finish the thought, I'm in his arms, then in the air, and as I hurtle toward the steel wall, my eyes closed, I wonder what I've gotten myself into, but before my head can hit anything harder than the space around it, I crash onto a slick metal floor.

I keep my eyes closed until I hear Fence say, “Get up honey. Smells like Death in here. And that's never a good thing.”

***

Jake McAllister sat at the desk in his fifth-floor loft with his head in his hands. The place was dark, save the lamp on his desk. The vast concrete home was sparsely furnished—a table that would fit four, an old leather couch Jake found on the side of the road one day on the way home from work, a TV with a split down the screen. Jake's bookshelves and his stereo were the only things he was really concerned with. That and his work.

Sitting on the desk were all manner of records—crumpled papers, napkins with wild, drunken chickenscratch on them, cardboard coasters from bars with a couple of names, maybe a phone number.

“It doesn't make sense Cassie.”

Jake's golden retriever looked at him curiously from her large, plush floor bed.

“Recruitment—it's through the roof. New ones every day. And they're actively recruiting—it's the first time since 1865 that they've done that.”

Cassie laid her head down on the floor, as if in thought.

“Fence Ranier—more active than ever. Hunters have sighted him all over the place, but they won't touch him after the...incident.”

Flashes of the police photographs shot through Jake's mind. A young hunter, didn't know what he was getting into, went up against Fence Ranier. The hunter—there were probably still parts of him fertilizing the park soil.

“So is this the way it begins? The final war? Can't be—not enough fireworks. But somethings going on...”

The dog lifted up its head, panted for a second, and then jumped up to lick its master in the face.

“Christ Cassie,” sighed Jake McAllister as he communed with his friend. “Why the hell did Dad leave me this inheritance?”

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