Livestock? “Oh, you mean people?” Gus had heard occasional yells, anguished voices echoing through the caves, but imagined they were cries in his dreams.
Gus barely followed that, wanting them to get to the point. “So — what, you’re saying you’re not going to try to turn me into… one of you?”
They weren’t making any sense to Gus. “If you’re not going to drink my blood — then what the hell do you want?”
“A proposal?” Gus banged on the side of his head as though it were a malfunctioning appliance. “I guess I’m fucking listening — unless I have a choice.”
“Diurnal?”
“Fucking what?”
“Massacre the unclean? You are vampires, right? Are you saying you want me killing your own kind?”
“What did you expect?”
Gus stepped back a few inches. He actually thought he was starting to understand now. “Somebody’s trying to move in on your block.”
“You’re picky eaters.”
A laugh rose inside Gus’s chest, nearly choking him. Talking about people like they were three for a dollar at the corner market.
“No. The opposite. That’s why I’m laughing.”
“I guess I throw it away.”
“Fine, I get it. You throw back your pints of blood and then toss away the human bottle. Here’s what I want to know. Why me?”
“How you figure that?”
The fat, naked guy rampaging through Times Square. The guy had attacked a family there, and at the time Gus was like, “Not in my city, freak.” Now, of course, he wished he had stayed back like all the rest.
Gus frowned. “That ‘unclean’ was my compadre. How you know all this, living down here in this shithole?”
“A gang war. That, I understand. But you left out something super-fucking important. Like — why the fuck should I help you?”
“I’m counting. They better be good ones.”
“I’ll give you that one.”
“Hmm. I don’t know. I can count pretty high.”
Gus turned. He saw a hunter first, one of the badass vamps who had grabbed him off the street. Its head was cowled inside a black hoodie, its red eyes glowing.
Next to the hunter was a vampire with that look of distant hunger now familiar to Gus. She was short and heavy, with tangled black hair, wearing a torn housedress, the upper front of her throat bulging with the interior architecture of the vampire stinger.
At the base of the stitched V of her dress collar was a highly stylized, black-and-red crucifix, a tattoo she said she regretted getting in her youth but which must have looked pretty fucking boss at the time, and which, since his youngest days, had always impressed Gusto, no matter what she said.
The vampire was his mother. Her eyes were blindfolded with a dark rag. Gus could see the throbbing of her throat, the want of her stinger.
Gus’s eyes filled with angry tears. The sorrow ached in him, manifested in rage. Since about age eleven, he had done nothing but dishonor her. And now here she was before him: a beast, an undead monster.
Gus turned back to face the others. This fury surged within him, but here he was powerless, and he knew it.
Dry sobs came up like sorrowful belches. He was sickened by this situation, appalled by it, and yet…
He turned back around. She was as good as kidnapped. Taken hostage by this “unclean” strain of vampire they kept talking about.
“Mama,” he said. Although she listened, she showed no change of expression.
Slaying his brother, Crispin, had been easy, because of the longstanding bad feelings between them. Because Crispin was an addict and even more of a failure than Gus. Doing Crispin through the neck with that shard of broken glass had been efficiency in action: family therapy and garbage disposal rolled into one. The rage he accumulated through decades had evaporated with every slash.
But delivering his
Gus’s mother was removed from the chamber, but the hunter stayed behind. Gus looked back at the three, seeing them better now. Awful in their stillness. They never moved.