Sweeter Than Wine
Horrified, I still had no idea what it meant.
“Tell me what I want to know. I will be quick,” Xopher demanded. “Otherwise she will die as slowly and horribly as I can manage, while you are forced to watch, then you will die slowly and horribly, as well.”
For the first time in my life, I felt my fangs suddenly erupt from my gums as I leaped for Xopher’s throat. But the older man was much too fast for me. He easily sidestepped my lunge and knocked me to the floor.
“Stay there!” Xopher commanded. I felt my muscles tense, and I knew that he was trying to push me, So, as I stood up, I pushed back, hard.
“Sit down over there and shut up!” I told him. His body jerked around in the direction of the chair, but he stopped suddenly, and grinned.
“A very creditable attempt, Mr. Gifford. Quite surprising, really.” He turned to Surica. “All right, there’s no point. Finish him.”
Surica turned toward me and raised her right hand. Her Beretta had been hidden all this time within the folds of her skirt. Trembling with the effort to resist, she leveled the weapon on me, and with tears streaming down her face, pulled the trigger. I felt a hot slap at my left shoulder, a handspan from my heart, but kept my feet under me.
“Forgive her,” Xopher said smugly. “She was my personal property for—”
Surica’s gun went off again, but this time it was aimed at Xopher’s face. The little bullet took him just to the left of his nose. She fired five more times and then the Beretta’s slide locked back.
Xopher’s face was a hideous ruin, and I doubt that he could see. He lunged for her, his clawlike fingers outstretched for her flesh, but the first big slug from my .45 knocked him off course. The next seven did for his chest what Surica’s volley had done for his face. I’d saved the ninth in the chamber and swapped magazines as he came at me.
He never made it. Suddenly one of his knees exploded in a crimson cloud, and, as he shrieked, the other knee exploded as well. Jerking himself along the floor with his hands, he threw himself through the front window and, in a shower of broken glass, was gone into the night.
I turned. My shoulder had already stopped bleeding. Surica was sitting on the floor, drained, her skirt a colorful swirl all around her.
In the door to the hall stood Quinn, his .44 Magnum smoking in his hand. Quyen was right behind him with a little compact auto of some kind.
He grinned. “That’s the way we do it in Jersey.”
Only he said, “Joisey”.
Suddenly, from the outside, we heard six more shots, then the gunning of a big, powerful engine and the squeal of tires. Surica was out the front door immediately, swapping .380 Beretta magazines as she went. I jumped out the broken window that Xopher had made his escape through.
Anton lay on his face in front of the house, halfway on the cement driveway, halfway on the rain-sodden lawn. I could see before I got to him that his right arm had been driven over and was crushed at the elbow.
His Glock lay in the middle of the drive, six feet from his hand.
28: DESPERATE MEASURES
“Evil is inevitable, but is also remediable.”—Horace Mann
Priscilla got to her fallen husband before I did, throwing herself to her knees beside his body, patting ineffectually at his bloodsoaked sleeve.
She was clearly afraid of injuring him more.
Surica and I reached his side a moment after that, squatting down. We shared a glance. Both of us could tell, from the unhealthy way he was breathing and the faint flutter we could both hear of his failing heartbeat, that there was a lot more wrong with him than an injured arm.
He had minutes left. The smell of death was already on him. I didn’t want to turn him over or move him. Priscilla looked up, saw the way that Surica and I were regarding one another, and cried, “Yes, do it!”
“Even if—” I started.
“Even if!” Tears streamed down her face. “We’ll live with it! You do!”
Surica saw me nod and was on her feet, running toward the house. I called after her, unnecessarily, to hurry, then turned my attention back to Anton. If his heart stopped beating, I would have to turn him over to keep him going. Not knowing the extent of his injuries, I desperately didn’t want to move him. “Hang in there, help is on the way!”
Clearly, the silver beads had worked, or Xopher would just simply have walked away. I had no illusion he’d been finished off; I wouldn’t have been. Yet I couldn’t believe he still had this kind of murderous energy left in him. As I worked over Anton, Quinn and Quyen, behind me, were speculating that the virus might create a secondary circulatory system, stimulating arteries and veins to expand and contract—the latter, of course, already have one-way valves to help the process along—while the heart was being encouraged to repair itself.
Sometimes it’s good to have distractions like that.
Before I could add my own two cents’ worth to the seminar, Surica had returned with my kit. I took one of the large syringes I sometimes use instead of a Vacutainer to draw blood, plunged it by feel into my own carotid, letting it fill as quickly as it could. Barely able to find Anton’s carotid by now, I injected him, but I didn’t notice any immediate improvement, so I drew more blood from the other side of my neck.
As I turned, I noticed that Surica was doing the same thing to herself, probably on the time-tested principle that more is better. She shrugged and gave me a tiny, rueful grin, speaking in a voice so low Priscilla couldn’t hear her as she injected her blood into our friend. “If he turns, we’ll both be his sires. It’ll be like he’s our son.”
Suddenly, Anton’s heartbeat strengthened noticeably in power and consistency. He took a ragged breath, then another, very deep, and then groaned. Priscilla’s eyes grew wide with hope. She put her teary face down on the concrete next to his and murmured to her husband quietly.
I got up on my knees, and then to my feet, giving Surica an unnecessary hand. “Is that how you feel about me, like I’m your little boy?”
She took it seriously. “No, my lovely man, not in the slightest. Sometimes it feels as if you sired me in that cellar, not the other way around. You awoke something in me that I had long thought was dead.”
What can you say to that?
***
“Definitely Homo heidelbergensis,” Quyen declared, peering at the big living room television screen. “Except for the nose, of course, and I always wondered about that, anyway. Reconstructors can only make guesses about soft tissue.” She’d burned a DVD of her little computer’s recording of my conversation with Deabru. Inteview with the vampire. “He could be fifty thousand years old, maybe even older than that.”
“Cleverly disguised, of course,” Quinn added. “Gotta be theatrical prosthetics; I don’t suppose plastic surgery works for you guys, does it?”
He was right, of course. I opened my mouth to say so, but Quyen spoke again before I could. “There it is all the same, for the trained eye to see. Heidelberg Man, big as life in the 21st century. They’re currently believed to be the ancestors, both of Neanderthalensis and us.”
“Of course that could change tomorrow afternoon,” Quinn shrugged. “It’s all up in the air these days. The whole damn field has become extremely political, and Xopher could represent a third evolutionary branching. Fossilization is such a rare process there’s no way to know.”
“In any case, I think the fellow may be right,” said Quyen. “He isn’t human, not exactly, but a different species. I sort of expected that.”
Fifty thousand years old. I raised my eyebrows. “How come?”
Looking down at her lap, she grinned, suddenly a little shy. “Well, I noticed right away that there weren’t any rapes along his route from Charleston to Colorado. It’s just a guess, but I’d suggest that human females don’t attract Mr. Xopher, any more than, say, female chimpanzees attract human males. They give off the wrong pheromones.”
Her husband grinned. “I’m not so sure about that. I once knew this zookeeper
—”
Quyen started to reply but it was her turn to be interrupted.
“I think I knew the same guy,” Anton offered, “back when I was a rookie and working in the jail. Only with him, it was this Labrador retriever. Anybody care for another beer?” He started to get up. Priscilla pushed him back into the recliner and tucked an afghan in place.
That reminded me of another dog story, from the first Terminator movie, but I manfully repressed the urge to repeat it. I was still trying to absorb the idea that Xopher might be fifty thousand years old.
Maybe even older.
“You stay where you are,” she told him, trying to be stern. “I remember how tired I was after J...well, you know. You’ll need to rest.”
The cops had come and gone by now. Alerted by reports of gunfire—.40 S&W is one hellaciously loud cartridge—they’d arrived to find a man with fresh blood all over his shirt nursing a sore back and elbow.
It helped that he was their Chief of Detectives.
“It’s all very embarrassing,” he’d said. “My wife Priscilla and I—you know the boys, Honey, Mike Blessing and Bill Koehler?—were visiting with our friends the Giffords, here.” I nodded to both of the patrolmen, who knew me. “When the whole neighborhood, which is pretty quiet, normally, was rattled by what turned out to be repeated backfires coming from some kind of ancient flivver roaring down the street.”
“A Model A Ford, I think.” I was trying to be helpful.
Anton agreed, “That’s right, a Model A Ford.” But the man glared at me as if to say he could tell his own damned lies, thank you very much.
The cops both nodded with what they took for sudden understanding. I confess that I helped them just a little bit, pushing them gently to believe.
Anton sighed and shook his head. “Not knowing yet that the source was merely automotive, I went out to see what was happening, which is where I slipped on the wet pavement in the dark. I wrenched my back, bruised my elbow, bloodied my nose, and ruined a perfectly good shirt.”
My friend had told his first vampire lie.
Next, he’d be claiming he had lupus.
The youngsters had believed him, of course, and had gone away with the warm satisfaction that comes only from learning that one’s glorious leaders are all too human, and demonstrating, along the way that a good pratfall will cover many a greater sin. When the front door finally closed behind them and their headlights swept the glistening street and disappeared, he spoke again as I turned from the door.
“Xopher will be back, as good as new, just like me. What do we do now?”
For a moment, an image of Neanderthal families flashed through my mind, huddled in their caves around a tiny fire, asking the same question.
Their answer, of course, had been, “Die.”
29: THE SILVER STANDARD
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is
for good men to do nothing.”—Edmund Burke
In addition to my two Colt handguns, I have a shotgun, as well.
It’s a 12 gauge “slide-operated” Model 870 Remington (for which read, “pump”) with a short twenty-inch barrel, a long six-round magazine, and a pistol-gripped black plastic stock and forend. I bought it in a pawn shop because its menacing looks appealed to me—a shotgun ought to look menacing—and only found out later that it is almost perfectly worthless for shooting at claybirds or the real thing.
Anton had thought it was hilarious. He was another member of the Browning Superposed clan, only he favored 20 gauge for taking birds and their surrogates. The Remington is a fighting shotgun, nothing more.
But nothing less, either.
Ordinarily, since I don’t own a rifle, I load the shotgun with shells that are either filled with quarter-inch “#4” buckshot pellets, or a single one-ounce solid “slug”. At about .73 caliber, 437 grains’ weight, and almost 1700 feet per second, slugs are the most potent weapons in the household arsenal, the nearest you can get to a good old-fashioned British elephant gun. It seems to work, too: I haven’t seen a single old-fashioned British elephant since I bought the damn thing.
Or any married ones, either.
I didn’t know how much time we had before another visit from the Warden—Richard Francis Xopher, as he called himself—or Deabru, a name that countless generations of paleolithic Europeans had probably only dared whisper. Certainly not enough. He’d be back just as soon as he had recovered enough for another fight—it had taken me a couple of months to grow a new pinky, but I wasn’t going to make assumptions about the healing powers of a fifty-thousand year old vampire caveman who’d seen it all and done most of it twice, himself—and he’d be pissed.
I certainly would have been.
Anton had taken a few days off—they owed him, since he’d worked right through what had looked to be Priscilla’s mortal illness—to help me solve the problem of dealing with an adversary (and when I say “dealing” I mean “killing”) who had managed to survive others trying to kill him for at least fifty or a hundred thousand years so far. Emulating Scarlett O’Hara, Anton said he’d figure out what to do about his delicate condition—with regard to his job with the city—later.
Fifty or a hundred thousand years. I knew it. I believed it. But it was still difficult getting used to an idea like that. This guy had certainly seen wooly mammoths when they were still alive and well. He had probably even watched the giant critters being hunted and killed by my ancestors, as well as by Neanderthals. Cave bears, too. And dire wolves and saber-toothed tigers. Giant wooly rhinos with six-foot horns.
He wouldn’t have seen any giant sloths, though, they were North American.
The next morning, after some perusal of the Internet and a couple of telephone calls, I asked Quinn to join Anton and me in what I hoped would be a brief expedition into Darkest Denver, with the object of securing what I thought would be needed to solve our little problem. We took my old Suburban, with its deeply tinted ultraviolet-proof windows.
I was about as well prepared as I could be—with my long coat, dark glasses, floppy-brimmed hat, and sun block—for whatever walking out into the deadly sunlight I might have to do in pursuit of my objective. What was truly weird was seeing Anton dressed the same way. We looked like a pair of aging fraternity brothers who had lost a bet.
The womenfolk—who would have been greatly annoyed at being called womenfolk: Surica, Priscilla, and Quyen—had stayed back at the house, attempting to prepare for the next onslaught. This was our fight, mine and Surica’s, and I’d desperately wanted everybody else to go home. I felt more and more uneasy at having involved my friends—the only family I had in the world—in something that could get them killed.
“Surely you don’t think Xopher’s going to forget who shot his kneecaps off,” Quyen had put it bluntly. “He’ll come after us if you lose.”
Her husband had spent the morning epoxying the rest of my silver beads into the front ends of half a box of .44 Magnum 240-grain hollowpoints.
“Aside from thanking you for your supreme vote of confidence, Mrs. Kowalski, I don’t really know what else to tell you.” She’d been totally right, of course. This bastard troglodyte had imprisoned my Surica for damn near half a century, and had tracked her since 1989. He wasn’t ever going to forget somebody who had used his patellae for tiddly-winks.
Quyen hadn’t shot the guy, but only because she hadn’t gotten the chance. Quinn took up a lot of room in that doorway. She’d been right behind him—I’d seen her plainly enough myself—but by the time she got around her man-mountain spouse and lined up the sights of her Glock—a brand new .357 SIG—the Warden had escaped any further abuse.
Unless Anton had managed to connect, as well, outside. He couldn’t remember.
“Then kindly permit us to attend to the tactics here and you go get what you need down in Denver.” Surica and Priscilla had ganged up on us, agreeing with Quyen wholeheartedly. The three of them were as well provided for, self-defensewise, as circumstances permitted.
Priscilla had a well-worn Ruger Security Six .357 Magnum, Quyen had her Glock, and Surica had her Beretta. My .45 hadn’t done that much more damage to Xopher than my girlfriend’s silly little .380. The whole reason for this pilgrimage south was to obtain more effective ordnance.
So that’s the way it had been.
***
One of my pet—though admittedly trivial—annoyances is people who insist on saying “joolery”, rather than pronouncing it “jewel-ry”. They drive me almost as crazy as the illiterates who pronounce it “nook-you-ler”.
They certainly didn’t make that mistake at Acme Precious Metals and Findings, a wholesale “jewel-ry” supplier located in Commerce City, an industrial suburb more or less buried in the northern part of Greater Denver, known best for its scenic—and highly aromatic—oil refinery. The young lady behind the counter was very bright and well-spoken.
“Yes,” she said, “I think we have what you want. How much do you need?”
I smiled and told her, “That needs to be determined. We have to measure. Can you take us to the spool or bring the spool to us?” I don’t know why, but in my sunproof get-up—if Anton and I struck the girl as a little strange, she was polite and didn’t show it—I was feeling a lot like the shaky old man at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
All I needed was a cane.
Yeah, I know he didn’t have a cane.
I pulled a partially loaded dummy shotgun shell out of my pocket. The girl took a step back, but Anton showed her his badge an assured her that everything was right as rain, whatever the hell that means. I regretted the necessity. A person should be able to buy whatever he wants for whatever purpose he wants, and not be hassled by the rabbit people.
She nodded gamely and came back, barely holding up a big spool of incredibly fine one hundred percent pure silver chain. I put on a pair of latex gloves—the girl had to be calmed down again; there must be something in the water of Commerce City that turns people into timid little field mice—and sort of drizzled enough of the stuff into the shell to fill up the polyethylene shot cup inside it. I pulled it back out again, and keeping my rubber-protected thumb and forefinger in place, measured the amount of chain that had fit inside the shell against a printed paper yardstick taped to the underside of the glass countertop.