Sunshine

It was still mostly Con, that we got through. Even warded up the wazoo and covered in bright gold cobweb I was still only human. I was still slower and weaker than any vampire. But I had Con. And I was warded and webbed, and the vampires didn’t like tangling with me. They kept choosing to tangle with Con, even though they could see—graphically—what had happened to the last vampire or twelve or twenty-seven or four thousand and eight vampires that had tangled with Con. If we ever got to the end of all this, ha ha and so on, and wanted to find our way back out of the maze, it wasn’t a thread we would have to follow but a path paved with undead body parts.

Maybe they thought they’d wear him out or something.

I still got a few. You’d think offing a few vampires would feel like doing a community service, wouldn’t you? It doesn’t. Not even when they don’t explode. That’s why I started doing it with my hands. They didn’t explode, I discovered, if I merely jammed my fingers in under their breastbones and pulled.

My vampire affinity.

I lost track. There was gore and gruesomeness and then more of it and I hated all of it, and was ready to be killed, just to get away from it, if someone would promise me, cross their heart and hope to die, very very funny, that I wouldn’t rise again. In any semblance. I still wasn’t sure about the mechanics of turning and it seemed to me that dying in the present circumstances probably wasn’t the best recipe for staying quietly in my grave afterward. Supposing someone found enough of me to bury.

I would have liked to give up. I meant to give up. But I couldn’t. Like I couldn’t stay at home and hide under the bed, I guess. Maybe it was promising Con to stick around as long as I could. Stick seemed the right verb under the circumstances. Every time I lifted one of my blood-clotted shoes there was a sticky, ripping noise.

And then everything went quiet, at least except for the noise I was making. Mostly it was just breathing. Maybe bleating a little.

One of the things that had happened during the business of savaging our way through Bo’s army was that I’d begun to know where Con was, like I knew where my right hand or my left leg was. It was a bit like unwrapping something from swathes of tissue paper, or following an idea through its development to a conclusion. You have an inkling of something, some shape or concept, and it gets clearer and stronger till you know what it is. It happened while the occasional shrieks and dead-flesh noises went on, all those near-misses with my own death. I understood that I was crazy, crazy to be still alive, crazy to be doing what I was doing to stay alive, crazy to be trying to stay alive. This knowingness about Con was a strange island in a strange ocean.

That sense of Con’s presence, of his precise location, had undoubtedly saved my life several times in the carnage, if it hadn’t done much for my sanity. But it meant that when things suddenly went quiet and I felt someone—some vampire—coming noiselessly up behind me, I knew it was Con.

Well well, said a silent voice from an invisible speaker. This meeting has heen much more amusing than I anticipated.

I didn’t have to hear Con snort. He didn’t, of course. Vampires don’t snort, even with derision. But I knew as Con knew that the voice was lying when it said amusing.

I also knew who this was. Bo. Mr. Beauregard. The fellow who had got us in all this. The fellow we were here to have the final meeting with. Him or us. I was pretty sure things had only started to get amusing, even if they hadn’t gone quite as Bo had expected so far. And while I knew vampires didn’t get tired, exactly, I knew that they could come to the end of their strength. I’d seen Con coming to the end of his, out at the lake. I didn’t know how one evening of tearing up your fellow vampires limb from limb matched against having been chained to the wall of a house with a ward sign eating into your ankle and the sun creeping after you through the windows every day, day after day, but I doubted Con was feeling bright-eyed and bushy-tailed now. I sure wasn’t. I was missing my nice sympathetic human emergency room tech saying, “There’s nothing really wrong with you, we’re giving you a sedative and you can go home.” I was also so tired that the weirdness of my dark vision was starting to bother me again, like new shoes that aren’t quite broken in yet that you’ve been wearing too long. I couldn’t tell how much of what I seemed to be seeing was happening, and how much of it was my overstressed brain playing tricks on my eyes.