Sunshine

I had just time to remember what had happened in an alley when I had used a table knife.

The noise was different. There were no narrow alley walls for the gobbets to smack against. Instead I heard the thick heavy splat, like loathsome rain, as they fell around me. I’d forgotten the smell—the smell of something long dead and rotten. I thought, they’re not even a little human any more when they explode: they shatter so easily, like throwing an overripe melon against a fence. No melon ever smelled like this…

Con rematerialized from wherever he had been, from whatever he had been doing. I just managed not to wince out of his way too. The problem was he looked like a vampire, and at the moment he looked a lot more like a vampire than he looked like Con. One of the even-more-comforting-than-usual stories about vampires is that sometimes, during vampire gang wars for example, they go into berserker furies and tear anything they can get their hands on apart, not only their enemies but their comrades, the guys on their own side. Supposedly the berserker fit can last quite a while, and if a particularly effective dismemberer gets to the end of the bodies around it before the fit wears off, it will tear itself to shreds too.

Maybe this is a consoling story when you’re at home with a book or reading it off your combox screen: the idea that there are that many fewer vampires in the world, that they had done each other in while we humans cowered safely behind closed doors with a hell of a lot of wards nailed over them. (If you find yourself so unlucky as to be living somewhere there is a sucker gang war going on, you pin a lot of wards around your house, and you do not go out after dark or before dawn for any reason.) I didn’t know what a vampire running amok looked like, but it might have looked like Con. It wasn’t just…it wasn’t…Look, if you ever have the opportunity to choose between being eaten by a tiger and bitten by an enraged vampire, take the tiger.

I was probably off in my feeble little human she’s-in-shock-wrap-her-in-a-blanket-and-get-out-the-whisky space. Humans don’t deal with extreme situations very well. Our pathetic bodies freak out. We freeze, and our blood pressure falls, and we can’t think, and all that. I stood there, staring, while Con snarled and showed me his teeth, and didn’t offer me the blanket or the whisky or the hot sweet tea. Then—maybe he remembered I was his ally, maybe he’d remembered that but had momentarily forgotten, seeing me as soaked in blood and sprinkled with the remains of a mutilated enemy as he, that I was a mere human. Maybe the snarl was the vampire equivalent of “Hot damn! Well done!”

Whatever. He stopped snarling, and…drew his face together. When he seized my slimy hand and pulled me along after him again I didn’t gibber, I didn’t collapse, and I didn’t throw up. I stuffed my knife back into my pocket, and went.

I wish I could forget how it feels, your hair stuck to your skull with blood, foul blood running gummily down inside your clothes, invading your privacy, your decency, your humanity, till it chafes you with every breath, every movement, the tug of it as it dries on your skin feeling like some kind of snare. Blood in your mouth, that you cannot spit the vile taste of away. I think I must have gone into some kind of berserker fury myself. There are things you don’t want to know you can do, aren’t there? But if you’re lucky you never find them out. I found out too many of them, all at once. I, who had to leave the kitchen at Charlie’s when they were whacking up meat into joints or putting slabs of drippy pulpy maroony-red stuff through the grinder.

Blood stings when it gets in your eyes. And it’s viscous, so it’s hard to blink out again. It may not only be because the blood stings that you’re weeping.

I have always been afraid of more things than I can remember at one time. Mom, when I was younger, and still admitted to some of them, said that it was the price of having a good imagination, and suggested I stop reading the Blood Lore series (which was past thirty volumes even then) and maybe retiring Immortal Death and Below Hell Keep from the top bookshelf for a while. I didn’t, but it wouldn’t have done any good if I had. Reading scary books is weirdly reassuring, most of the time: it means at least one other person—the author— has imagined things as awful as you have. What’s bad is when the author comes up with stuff you hadn’t thought of yet.

I’d thought it was bad when I was just reading stuff I hadn’t thought of.

And even then I’d known that sometimes it’s worse when the author leaves it to your imagination.

I stopped using my knife. I found out I didn’t have to. I found out I could do it with my hands.