LIFE NEAR THE BONE Read online

  Disposing of the bodies. Now Thoreau never gave advice about that sort of thing. Damn odd. He knew about everything else, you'd think the man would have left some sort of road map. Jeff had to ponder the situation for two days before he could decide what to do. He had Mrs.Whipshaw and Potto cooling in the huge freezer she kept, strangely enough, in the spare bedroom of her ground-floor apartment.

  He had the occupant of the other downstairs apartment, punky-looking George with the orange and green blotch in his hair, stuffed over double at the waist in his broom closet. (Cluttered, cluttered. Baseball mitts, bats, skates, pool cues, bowling balls, smelly running shoes. Much too cluttered for anyone sane.)

  He had James, the quiet law student, in the bathtub in apartment on the second floor. He sat shriveling like an old potato with a radio in his lap. Pity it wasn't a law manual, though what good that would do him now Jeff couldn't guess.

  He had the Danju sisters waiting in their beds. Nice girls. Not a bother in the world, but the way they lived, unbelievable! Frozen dinner trays growing mold, magazines littering the carpet, thready dust balls and trailing spider webs and filmy bikini panties hanging everywhere. It was enough litter to turn the stomach. It took Jeff all night just to get their apartment under kind of control. He cursed them with every name in the book, nice girls or not. Anyone living like a pig needed to be called a swine.

  Old man Shorer was no trouble at all. He was all bent and crippled by arthritis. He couldn't run, he couldn't even crawl, not toward the last. Cried, though. Cried like a fucking baby. And him old as the hills, didn't make proper good sense to Jeff, but there it was. A man who chose to live with a cat that scratched out shit-ball litter every time he used the box had to be some kind of nut to begin with. Everyone knew you could get terminal diseases from cats. Jeff had saved Shorer a prolonged and, no doubt, much more painful death.

  Now to dispose of the bodies. Without Thoreau's help. Without his wisdom and guidance.

  And to return the apartment house--the entire building--to neat, impersonal harmony. It would take boxes and boxes of Glad trash bags, dozens of cardboard boxes from the Safeway. A wheelbarrow!

  Yes, he would need a wheelbarrow.

  He hoped the Dumpster wasn't full tonight. He would be taking numerous loads to it. His heart sang with freedom he was at last seeing the very edge of the pristine bone, a flicker of purity, and it was a glorious glimpse of paradise Heaven itself.

  #

  He heard the pounding of feet coming up the stairs before he ever heard knocking on the door. He was tired, sweaty, needed a shower cold and long. He peeked through the viewer and saw the intruder into this place of calm and peace was the treasonous poster man, Greg.

  Figured.

  "Jeff?" Greg called, his face pressed against the door. "Let me in."

  Jeff unbolted the lock and swung wide the door, turning away and walking across the room as he did so.

  "Jeff?" There was a pregnant pause. Then: "What the hell? What did you do with all the furniture? Jesus."

  Jeff wore only a pair of grimy shorts. His hair stuck out on end as he'd been sleeping. And not washing. He was covered with dirt and smudges that looked like tar or oil. "What do you want now?"

  "I've been worried about you. I tried to call, but the operator told me the phone was disconnected."

  "So?"

  "Well…uh…how are you?"

  "What do you care? You vamoosed for a decadent lifestyle, didn't you? You want to be featured on 'The Rich and Famous' one day, don't you? So why would you care?"

  Greg cleared his throat. He looked like a weasel caught in a hole. The criticism, however exaggerated, was a little too close to home. "Did you…did you find work?"

  Jeff chortled unpleasantly. "Go away, Greg. I have nothing say to you." He left the room and disappeared into the darkened hallway.

  Greg followed close behind. "Jeff, wait. I really mean it. I'm still worried. How are you paying the rent? Are you eating? I could help, you know. I haven't really abandoned you."

  "No rent. Mrs. Whipshaw said so. Dear old lady, dear bird lady." Jeff went directly into the hall bath and stepped in the tub. He slipped out of his shorts and threw them on floor. He turned on the shower, drew the curtain.

  "No rent?"

  "Rent free," Jeff said above the roar of the water. "Ask her yourself."

  "Maybe I will."

  The shower curtain snapped open and droplets of water flew in the air, spotting Greg's face. "No, you won't. Don't you dare. You stay out of my business affairs. You're no longer in my life, remember? You wanted your fucking posters and your soft cushions and your steak and potatoes. Remember?"

  "Jeff, can't you talk with me without fighting? Can't you see your way clear to be reasonable?"

  Jeff shut the curtain. He sudsed down his body and scrubbed himself hard with the washcloth. Finally he said, in as sane and sensible a tone as he could muster, "Let me get through and I'll take you on a tour of my new orderly world. "

  Full of misgivings, Greg lowered the toilet seat and sat down to wait. This time he had to do something before he left. This time it was absolutely imperative he not leave Jeff alone with his warped delusions. He had known him too long not to try to help.

  Jeff finished bathing, dried, dressed himself quickly in jeans and shirt and sneakers.

  "I've seen the place, Jeff. You got rid of everything. This looks like a prison."

  "Not a prison, a sanctuary. A man has to begin at home. Then . . ." he glanced slyly at Greg. ". . . he branches out."

  "I don't think you're going to find very many followers. Not many people want to join a cult that denies all possession." Greg laughed easily, but soon quieted when Jeff walked past him to the front door. "Come on. I want to show you how I've hacked at the chaos and brought it under supervision. I want to show you what can be done when you simplify your life, when all the extraneous is ruthlessly cut away down to the very roots where the trouble lies."

  Jeff took his friend to Mrs. Whipshaw's freezer first thing. They walked together through the scrupulously cleaned empty apartment to the spare bedroom.

  When the stunned, horrified remonstration began, it was a beast of a battle to get Greg subdued enough to shut his mouth.

  To shut his mouth forever.

  #

  Less than a week passed after Greg's visit before Jeff wandered through the silenced apartment house in the middle of the night saying good-bye to his perfectly balanced world.

  People had come to inquire. Mrs. Whipshaw's son screamed that he'd be back with the police. He would see his mother, goddamnit, if he had to bring in the National Guard to do it. She never would have left town without telling him, he claimed from the bottom of the apartment steps. Don't tell him she would.

  The boyfriend of one of the Danju sisters left without a squawk, but as he went to his car, he kept squinting suspiciously over his shoulder.

  Two law school students stopped by to ask why their friend had not been to classes. Sick? They hadn't heard from him. Too sick to call them? Contagious? Wasn't that funny, though, he always seemed in such good health.

  Yes, it was time to go. As much as he hated to. He had invested a ridiculous amount of time in creating order, in simplifying the complex. It was a shame, terribly unjust, that he must flee what was an almost perfect creation.

  Ye t...yet... An apartment house in the center of a seedy district inside of an abhorrently chaotic big city was no real place for him, anyway. He needed his own Walden Pond. He needed to escape to the wilds, sequester himself away from the mad, chattering, bruising world.

  With the money Greg and the apartment dwellers had on persons or in their possession, Jeff took a bus from Houston to the dry West Texas town of Midland. Once there, he hired a taxi driver to take him into the desert.

  "Where?"

  "Where no one lives," Jeff said, waving money in the man's face.

  "Are you nuts? How are you gonna get back? No phone there, buddy. Nothing but sna
kes and tumbleweeds, sand and cactus. You can't go out there."

  "A friend's meeting me later in his car, if it's any of your business. I'll come back with him. Now will you drive?"

  He drove. For two hours. Blabbering all the way, bitching about the heat, the absurdity of this, the kooks he ran into, what a job.

  Jeff ignored him in favor of reading, for the dozenth time, from Walden. He knew exactly what he was doing. He knew where the bone glistened most cleanly. It was not in the woods where Thoreau had hidden away himself. It was not in the mountains where shady towering presences safeguarded the timorous. It was not in the lush valleys where Nature rioted and the senses were overwhelmed.

  It was in the plain open desert, the place man had not yet desecrated with his two-bit palaces and his glittering signs, and his bubbling, stinking tarmac laid end to end forever and amen.

  It was here in the steaming heart of untrodden, forgotten land, that Jeff Castain knew he would find the ultimate simplification. He wanted that more than breath itself.

  This buddy of yours don't show up in time, you could have a sunstroke out here without water. I tell ya, this is the craziest thing I've ever seen," the cabby complained. "I don't like it none-a-bit. I ain't gonna be responsible for you dying out here, you know, a hundred-five in the shade, if there was any shade. I been trying to talk you outta this, ain't that right?"

  Jeff failed to answer except to say, "Pull over here. This is where I get out."

  Even before the taxi made a U-turn on the infrequently traveled two-lane highway, Jeff was already heading off across the hard packed sands. He moved west toward the lowering sun, Thoreau's book clutched tightly in hand.

  Heat mirages blinked on and off in the distance like defective pale blue neon tubes. A lone vulture rode the high currents, a dot in the scalding blue sky. Here was soul. Here was where eternity sat down to shake hands with creatures courageous enough to come unfettered.

  Jeff Castain looked back only once to make certain he was losing sight of the long black strip of highway. To make sure he was leaving civilization behind. He thought now it had never belonged to him. That world was under rule of someone else. Someone other. Alien.

  He lost all sense of time when day segued into night into day into night. He stumbled and dropped the book; picked it up, surprised to see his hands blistered black, but never mind, never mind.

  Finally his tongue swelled in his mouth and hung over his cracked lips like a fat gray slug. His lungs, a fiery bellows, labored to keep him going. His eyes had swollen to slits blocking the blood red disk of the sun. His skin--his clothes at some past time discarded--seeped clear fluid from pustules that he split apart with pinched fingers.

  Each passing second he could feel the loosening of the hold the world had on the flesh. He was a dragon whose scales fell clattering at his feet. Each faltering, dragging step he managed to take brought him ever nearer the crux of reality. Ever closer to the bone.

  He yearned. He begged. He prayed. In the end, he raged. "Didn't I sacrifice enough?" He yelled across the endless sand. "Didn't I scrape past all the filth?"

  He pulled on his sack of skin until he tore off pieces and had ripped an ear from his skull. He went to his knees and screamed soundlessly.

  At last he could hear a velvety voice hissing across the still air as it approached. He was almost home, it said.

  He bowed his head in relief and wept bloody tears.

  Come, it said. Nearer, it said. Where life is simple, life is true. Where no one knows you, no one cares, and nothing can get you back again.

  Come now. Where you belong, it said.

  Ever closer.

  Come with me.

  Where life is sweetest,

  Near the bone.

  Near the white, white

  Bone…

  THE END

  ANTIDOTE

  Copyright Billie Sue Mosiman, 1995

  First published in 100 VICIOUS LITTLE VAMPIRES, edited by Robert Weinberg, Stefan Dziemianowiez, and Martin Greenberg, Barnes and Noble Books.

  Carmine made it through the long tunnel and halted across from the park in the darkest part of the street to pry a quarter inch of hard bio-metal scab from the knuckle of his right hand. It would grow back, of course. All the small patches growing over the surface of his skin like a creeping cancer would eventually merge until his only opening was the vent for his nose and eyes. Thus encased in his new skin, immobile, he would die of starvation.

  Vampire punishment, cruel and unusual, heartless. A strain of insecticide had been developed in the late twentieth century to control moth and butterfly larvae. It effectively encased them in their skins so they starved. This technology had been further enhanced to be used on the undead man. By the age of twenty-one Carmine had been caught in his native Italy and strapped to a gurney and injected. Nothing else killed his kind, not the traditional stake through the heart, that only pissed them off, not burning, for they could walk out of any fire, and not beheading, for they could carry their heads under their arms and have them stitched on again.

  The Hosts had won the war in the nick of time and it was through geneticists who had been working to save crops. Or rather, they had won the war. For a half century Vampires and Hosts coexisted, killing and being killed in turn. Now a majority of the vampires had been captured and inoculated with the deadly vaccine. There were few left who were disease-free. When an inoculated beast bit a Host, making him a vampire, that beast too carried the tainted blood that would finally bring him down.

  It was rumored, however, that Fondred, the King of the Vampires, had commissioned his brightest people to seek an antidote to the vaccine. It was further rumored that one of their kind working in research in the far reaches of the East Texas wastelands had done just that.

  A cure!

  But only if Carmine was able to stay alive long enough to arrive at the enclave and be inoculated with the antidote. Only if Fate allowed him time to reach Texas before his nights ran out and his skin turned to a solid case of shiny metal armor with him lying slobbering behind the cold hard mask, his eyes wild and rolling from the suffocation. It was worse than being buried alive. He'd be able to see his enemy, smell his fresh blood, hunger for him with every molecule, and yet not be capable of the pounce, of the rendering and tearing of the carotid, of drinking his fill, of satiation.

  A girl's voice broke through Carmine's reverie to ask, "Do you have somewhere to go tonight? Would you like some company?"

  He sneered at this approach before he turned and showed his face, his fangs. Even today the Hosts had their women on the streets offering their bodies, never knowing if they would be used for pleasure or for food. It was walking suicide, and he hadn't any remorse in his heart when he took down one of these idiot whores.

  He swiveled slowly, his upper lip rising as he did so to show her true terror. When she came into view, his lip froze in place and he blinked and his heart stuttered in his chest.

  She was a great old one who had been taken in her youth, she was a queen. From the fiery furnace of her gaze he trembled and shrank back. She hissed, showing him her own fangs. She was far stronger than he, her physical power rippling the muscles beneath the fair skin of her biceps as if they were full of snakes. "I'm not your supper," she said. "You mistake me for another sort of female, one weaker than I."

  "How did you know I was a vampire?"

  "I saw you tear off the bio-metal and fling it from you."

  "Are you infected too?"

  "Not me! I'm too clever to be caught. And so was my Master who made me. I doubt even now these years later that they've gotten their hands on him. So will we walk together or are you intent on your solitude?"

  "Come along," he said, turning and moving through the shadows, staying close to the buildings' walls. "I'm on my way out of this morbid city. You can come with me to the outskirts if you want."

  "Leave Mobile? Why would you want to do that? From your accent I can tell you're foreign. Italian, perhaps
? We've had an influx of Italians lately. Mobile takes in the foreigner quite nicely. Besides, you're doomed and there's no better place than here beneath the century oaks to die. Then again, perhaps one place is as good as another. We do have a stench of death here, our kind falling so rapidly sometimes you must step over them on the sidewalks and in the gutters come early morning." She shuddered involuntarily.

  "I won't die." Carmine straightened his shoulders and walked with more purpose.

  "Certainly you will. You've got the metal growing on you even as we speak."

  Carmine nodded his head. He picked at an imaginary fleck of the metal he thought might be growing on his left wrist. "Yes, but Fondren made finding an antidote his highest priority and I've heard one of our scientists in Texas has found it. I'll be saved. I've come halfway around the world to reach him."

  She laughed, the sound so sudden and unappealing in its derision that Carmine stopped again and glared at her. His lips rose in automatic response and his fingers spread, yearning to find themselves wrapped around her young, tender throat. Strength of fury would cause him to challenge her if it came to that even though he knew she would not be overcome.

  "It's a lie!" She laughed no more, seeing his face. She spoke again, more quietly, knowing his dignity ruffled, his hope shattered. "We've all heard the same, but it's not true. It's just moonbeams on a summer's night. It's wispy fog along a swampy bank. It's a child's tale to ward off the nightmare."

  "How would you know that?" He knew he was speaking out of turn, that if she chose she might take him prisoner, bind him, and keep him still until the bio-metal did its harsh work, but he must know why she called it a lie.

  She lowered her head and black glossing hair hung past her cheeks like a curtain. "I had a friend who believed the rumor and make the trip. He came back just days before his final encasement within the bio-metal. He had searched out the entire southeast portion of the state of Texas looking for this miracle worker and found no one remotely familiar with the legend. It's a scurrilous lie. More horrible because it sends so many like you on a fruitless last march cross country for no reason."