The worst thing about vampires is that they’re dead. That whole wanting to suck your blood business runs a close second, but for sheer creepiness, it’s the dead bit that gets me every time. They’re up and walking around and talking and sucking blood, but they’re dead. And then there’s the whole terminology problem—how can you kill something that’s already dead? It’s just wrong.
I was twenty-four the first time I… destroyed? dispatched?… a vampire. That’s when I found out that all the books and movies are wrong. When you stick a wooden stake into their hearts, vampires don’t disintegrate into dust. They don’t explode. They don’t spew blood everywhere. They just look surprised, groan, and collapse into a pile of corpse. But at least they lie still then, like corpses are supposed to.
Since that first kill (I might as well use the word—there really isn’t a better one), I’ve discovered that only if you’re lucky do vampires look surprised before they groan and fall down. If you’re unlucky and miss the heart, they look angry. And then they fight.
There are the other usual ways to kill vampires, of course, but these other ways can get a bit complicated. Vampires are notoriously difficult to trick into sunlight. They have an uncanny ability to sense when there’s any sunlight within miles of them, and they’re awfully good at hiding from it. Holy water doesn’t kill them; it just distracts them for a while, and then they get that angry look again. And it takes a pretty big blade to cut off someone’s head—even an already dead someone—and carrying a great big knife around New York City, even the Bronx, is a sure way to get arrested. Nope, pointy sticks are the best way to go, all around.
My own pointy stick is actually more of a little knife with wood inlay on the blade—the metal makes it slide in easier. I had the knife specially made by an old Italian guy in just about the only ratty part of Westchester, north of the city. I tried to order one off the internet, but it turns out that while it’s easy to find wood-inlay handles, the blades themselves tend to be metal. Fat lot those people know.
But I wasn’t thinking any of this when I pulled the knife out of the body on the ground. I was thinking something more along the lines of “Oh, bloody hell. Not again.”
The problem with killing a vampire, of course, is that then you’ve got a corpse on your hands. A corpse with a hole in its heart. Coroners tend to describe it as a “post-mortem wound.” Usually coroners don’t know quite how post-mortem, of course—all they have to go on are things like rigor mortis and the rate of decomposition, and corpses that are up and walking around and talking simply don’t decompose all that quickly. At least, not on the outside. Apparently, the insides can get pretty rotten. Whatever it is about sucking blood that keeps them going, it works on the heart, the blood vessels, and the brain, but not much else. The liver turns to something kind of like pâté, all mushy and spreadable. And you don’t even want to think about the stomach. At least, I don’t.
I didn’t even want to think about the outside of the vampire in the middle of the cement playground right next to Middle School 45 in the Bronx. What I wanted to do was gather up my groceries, currently scattered across the sidewalk on the other side of the chain-link fence behind me, and go home to my brand-new satellite TV. A Law and Order re-run was sure to be on. It was always on some channel. I wanted to open a can of Pringles, curl up on the couch with my cat, and stare blankly at the screen while television cops solved big problems in less than an hour. But my apartment, and thus my television, were right across the street from the school. I really didn’t want to listen to the fuss outside my window when someone found the corpse with the post-mortem wound in the heart. The Bronx is loud enough without adding hysterical screaming.
So instead, I pulled my cell phone out of my jacket pocket and scrolled for Nick’s number.
That’s when I realized that my hands were shaking. And covered with blood—they left little streaks across the screen.
I managed to find the right number anyway and waited while the line on the other end rang.
“Nick here.”
“Nick?” My voice was shaking almost as much as my hands. “It’s Elle.”
“Hey,” he said. “What’s up?”
“I’ve got a… another problem. I need help again.”
“The usual? Where?”
I hated to think that dead vampires were becoming “the usual” in any sense of the term, but I told him where I was and he said he’d be there in half an hour.
“And Elle?” he said. “See what you can do to hide the body until we get there.”
Hiding a dead body in the middle of a concrete slab of playground is not easy, even in the Bronx, even after dark. The fight had taken place in the darkest corner of the block, at least, so I decided to go for camouflage. I hooked my hands under the body’s armpits and hauled it upright, leaning it against the chain-link fence. I tried to loop one of its arms through the fence to keep it upright, but I couldn’t get more than the forearm through the gaps in the fence chain-links. That looked totally wrong. Finally I used a broken piece of wire hanging off the fence to punch a hole in its shirt collar. Then I twisted the wire through the collar and back through the fence. It wasn’t perfect, but it did keep the top half of the body from slumping over.
Its head kept flopping over in a suspiciously dead way, but there wasn’t anything I could do about that at the moment, so I crossed its legs at the ankles and hoped it looked more passed-out-drunk than propped-up-dead.
By that time I was breathing hard from the exertion of moving around a 200-pound dead guy—it’s called “dead weight” for a reason—but at least my hands had stopped shaking. I gathered up my scattered groceries and pulled an unbroken glass bottle of root beer out of the plastic bag. I wrapped the vampire’s free hand around it, hoping it looked like a regular beer (I’d stopped drinking alcohol after that first kill—these days, it scares me to think of having my judgment hindered in any way). Then I settled down onto the ground next to the big dead vampire corpse to wait for Nick and his squad of vampire killers to come clean up this mess for me.