Charlie Huston - My Dead Body: A Novel

ALSO BY CHARLIE HUSTON

In the Joe Pitt casebooks:

Already Dead
No Dominion
Half the Blood of Brooklyn
Every Last Drop

In the Henry Thompson trilogy:

Caught Stealing
Six Bad Things
A Dangerous Man

The Shotgun Rule
The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death

To Simon Lipskar.
For suggesting that I might avoid a return to bartending
by writing a book in a genre other than crime.
Fantasy, SF, I dont know, horror maybe.

And to Mark Tavani.
For ignoring his entirely rational first reaction.
Vampires really arent my thing.

If youre listening to this Im dead.

(laughter)

Could be thats maybe only funny to me right now. Listen to a little more of this and could be itll be funny to you too. But probably not. My guess, anyone listening to this wont find much amusement. If you believe it, that is. You dont believe it, youll probably just about die laughing. I would.

I wonder how I did die.

So many goddamn options. The mind fucking boggles. But probably I just got plain shot. Course, seeing as how many times Ive been shot before, it must have been a well-placed bullet. Or just a lot of them all at once. Then again, I knew a guy in my line who got machine-gunned more than once and lived to tell about it both times.

(laughter)

Lived to tell about it. Thats funny. But you got to be in on the joke.

I was put in on the joke when I was sixteen. Happened in a bathroom at CBGB during a Ramones gig in 77. What it was, a guy was paying me twenty bucks to hand-job him, and while I was doing it he chewed a hole in my neck and started slurping.

(laughter)

Okay, maybe you had to be there.

That guy, if I could have ever got my hands on that guy. I got my hands on plenty of other people I had a problem with. But Im not the type to keep score.

(laughter)

Trust me, the jokes dont get any better the rest of the way.

What I notice about getting older, things that seemed funny before just seem boring or stupid or sad. Things that shouldnt seem funny at all suddenly have a lighter side. No, thats not it. Nothing lighter about it. More that things you never thought youd laugh at you find yourself laughing at because you got no other choice. Like the alternative is you go digging under the sink for some Drno to guzzle.

(laughter)

See what I mean.

Tell the truth, this is the most Ive laughed in forever. Not literally forever, Im not that old. But, yeah, something about this is hitting the funny bone.

Probably its the idea of you, whoever you are, listening to this. For you, this is one of two things. Either its the lamest prank ever, or its too little too late. If youre listening to this, either everything has blown up and everyone knows everything, or it hasnt. Either way, Im gonna tell it.

So.

So, hey, heres some trivia for you. Did you know a pregnant woman has about forty percent greater blood volume than a woman whos not pregnant? Take a woman, shes a hundred and ten pounds. Her blood volume is about seven percent of that. Seven point seven pints. Or thereabouts. Call it eight pints. Over her first two trimesters shes gonna add forty percent more volume. Little over three pints. Going into her last trimester, shes hauling eleven pints.

More than a fat man.

That much blood, you can stretch that two or three months. One body in the ground and youre above it for another sixty to ninety days.

Well, two bodies in the ground.

Whats that worth, that extra forty percent, over a regular person and their seven to ten pints, whats that extra worth?

The blood of a pregnant woman and her baby, whats the price on that?

(laughter)

Im not laughing cause I think its funny. Its just Im all out of Drno. So.

Just tell it like it happened. Thats what she said. Like talking is a gift I have or something. Well, better talking than writing. You had to make sense of this by reading my chicken scratch youd be crying not laughing.

So.

And that wasnt a rhetorical question by the way. I know the price. The blood of a pregnant woman goes for about twenty grand. Thats the price in dollars anyway.

Theres all kinds of prices you can pay for such a thing. Parts of yourself that will never grow back.

But thats the story. And Im supposed to tell it. Like it happened.

So okay.

So Im a Vampyre. Spelled with a Y instead of an I. Capitalized like its a name. Dont ask me, just tradition I guess. Anyway. Vampyre with a Y, thats the real deal. With an I, thats for scaring babies.

Im the kind that scares everyone.

And when this started, I was a secret. Lived in an apartment, just like you. Well, just like you if you kept a mini-fridge of blood. When it ended, I was living in a sewer. Downward mobility being a danger to my kind.

Should be a punch line for something: Vampyre in a sewer.

But its not.

Its my life.

(laughter)

Still, it makes me laugh.

So.

This is what happened.

I can feel it, that little extra bit of heat. And smell staleness in the air. Heat and carbon dioxide, a combination that equals life. Something breathing and exhaling, the air filling its lungs, the oxygen being absorbed. Something warm and breathing, you can count on at least one thing about it. Its full of blood.

Ahead of me in the dark, something alive.

Alive for now anyway.

I didnt expect him to be so much trouble to find. When he ran down Freedom Tunnel he was soaked in the cripples blood; so not like there was much chance Id lose the scent. I figured to stroll after him, kick some garbage every now and then to let him know I was there, keep him running until he keeled over gasping and wormed his way into some crack in the walls. I figured the hardest part would be deciding if I wanted to let him cut me a little while I reached in to drag him out, or if I wanted to look around for something I could ram down his hiding place a few times until I cracked his head open.

Then he went shit-diving.

I dont know if it was a plan he had, the way he went spastic and cut up the cripple makes me think planning isnt his forte, but when he dropped out of the train tunnel and wallowed in a bank of sewage that had washed up in the storm drain below he put me off the scent.

Went from tracking a guy who smelled like an abattoir to a guy who smelled like a porto-potty. Which pretty much describes the way everything under Manhattan smells.

Got dicey after that. Cagey little fucker realized I wasnt right on his ass, he started to calm down a bit, caught his breath some, stopped panting so much, stopped stumbling so much, started picking spots he could hole up a minute at a time and be quiet. If thered been any kind of light at all Id just have started throwing rocks at him until he went down. All I needed was one of those odd reflections you get down here sometimes. Sunlight filters through the grates over the train tunnels, a spear of it finds its way down a sluice, it reflects in some runoff from the sewers and you find a whole section of drain takes on a haze of light. Enough so you might see an idea of your hand if you held it an inch from your eyes. Thats you. Me, Id see a damn sight more than my hand. But even my eyes need