Authors: Jaden Kilmer
“You got a smoke?” He asks. I notice his fingertips and the whites of his eyes are a pale yellow color.
“No, sorry,” I say.
“You sure?” He smiles. I see two rows of yellow half-moons behind his lips.
“I’m sure.”
“That’s all right.”
I put the earbud back in and try to blot him out with the sounds of the next song on the album, but it’s not long before he’s trying to talk to me again.
“You takin’ the bus?”
“That’s why I’m sitting at a bus stop...”
“Oh, well yeah, I just meant, ya know, you’re pretty young for takin’ the bus solo.”
“I’m pretty good about handling myself.”
“You sure? You know, I got a car. Why don’t I drive ya home? That way you can stay dry, ya see what I’m sayin’?”
Yeah, red flags everywhere now. I stand up and grab my bag, trying to hide the fact that I’m growing scared, and start to leave. He stops me.
“Wait, wait. Where ya going? I thought you were taking the bus?” Another half-moon filled smile.
“Oh, you know, I really don’t actually need the bus after all.”
“Nonsense, you’ll freeze if you walk home. Let me drive you.”
“I’m really good. I don’t need that.” I don’t care about subtlety anymore, I’m moving away as fast as I can without all out running. A large hand grabs my shoulder and pulls me back. The man leans his face in right next to my ear and whispers “That was not an offer.”
“Let me go!”
“Aw, don’t be like that.”
“Please!”
“All right enough. Shut up.” Suddenly I feel something else pressing at me. Right on the small of my back. For a moment I think it’s his other hand, and then it dawns on me that it’s a knife. I feel my whole body go limp. People tell you you have two responses to danger: Fight and flight. I had tried flight, and now I was discovering that there are in fact, three responses to danger: Fight, flight, and surrender.
“That’s my girl,” he says.
“Please...” I can no longer manage anything but a whisper. “What do you want?”
“You.”
My eyes catch something like a shadow moving on the road ahead, back the way I’d came. I think about crying out for help, but hold back. I think if I call out, I die. Besides, my eyes might only have been picking up on the rain moving.
The man turns me around and forces me to start walking up the road, away from Dodger’s house. I obey. I move as slowly as possible, scanning for anything that can save me;a passerby I could call to, a place to run. I see a few possibilities, but then I feel the knife at my back and decide it’s just too risky.
I sense something moving again. This time with my ears. Something’s moving behind us. A chill runs deep into my bones and I feel something there with us- not in the physical or mental sense of the word, but instead a pervasive, all-encompassing cloak. The air suddenly feels thick with it. It’s a feeling I had never felt before, yet somehow knew intimately.
I feel Death coming.
“Hey, sir. I don’t think you want to be doing that,” says a voice.
The man whispers to me to stay perfectly still. He keeps the knife at my back and answers the voice. “Hm. You’re young too. You want to come with us?”
“You sick, disgusting little pervert. Let her go or I
will
kill you..”
I know that voice. I’d never heard her talk like this. Her words so cutting, so charged. It’s Dodger.
“You’re feisty,” says the man. “You know, I think I like you more.”
And that knife is completely through my spine.
I fall to the ground.
Dead.
It’s funny. All the talk about what happens after you die. Where you go, what happens to your soul and body, and in every opinion I’ve heard, no one got it right. Because I
feel
alive.
I can still see my killer. I see my blood dripping off his knife and onto my corpse. I hear him laugh and Dodger gasp. I smell his breath and feel the blood on my back. I feel the pain. The burning, screaming, unimaginable pain around the wound in my back where I was killed. I am aware of it all, and yet I’m locked. I can’t move. Rigor Mortis I believe is the term; where every bone and muscle in my body becomes locked into place after death and I can’t even blink. And yet, I am still aware of everything.
I see Dodger run at the man. And she ran
fast.
She closes the distance between the two of them in a second. The next part is a blur. I see the man bring his knife down on her, but from my angle it’s too hard to tell if it lands. The next bit of movement I can see for sure is Dodger grabbing my killer’s head in both hands and snapping his neck.
My killer falls and Dodger kneels beside me. She stares into my eyes and says “I know you’re still in there. You’re going to be okay.” She bites her arm and holds it to my mouth. She bit hard, because I can taste her blood.
“Don’t be afraid. I’ll get you through this. Just do as I say, Scout.”
Her blood keeps trickling into my mouth. My tongue regains movement.
“Don’t be shy, either. You need as much of this as you can.” She bites the arm again and brings it to my mouth. By now there’s a good steady flow of blood coming. I feel Death’s pale embrace leave slowly. First it leaves my mouth, then my heart and head, and it’s not long before the feeling of life spreads across my whole body, with the last parts to return being my fingers and toes.
Dodger helps me off the ground and envelops me in a hug. I try to ask her something, but she just shushes me and holds me tighter. For a moment, I forget about the rain, Dodger’s body like a campfire on a cold night.
“I guess I should start explaining,” says Dodger.
*****
Back at Dodger’s house, she sits me down on her couch and drapes a blanket over me. She paces for a bit, biting her lower lip as she mulls over whatever she’s about to say.
“I’m not sure where to start,” she says.
“How about at the part where I died? I’d love an explanation on that.”
Dodger rifles through a drawer and pulls out a cigarette wand and lighter. She fits one end between her front teeth and lights the other.
“You smoke?” I ask. “A cigarette wand?”
“Been a while. But yes.” She’s holding onto the wand with her index and middle finger, and when she draws it out and lets a perfect smoke ring escape her lips it looks like she’s been smoking for a very long time. “So, the dead thing, right?”
“Yes.”
“What exactly about the dead thing?”
“Well, I’d like to know, um... well... how I’m still alive, for one thing.”
“Well, you’re not
still
alive. ‘Cause you died. And then I brought you back.”
“Great... that makes sense.” Bruce walks into the room and rubs the back of his head against my knee. I reach down and scruff him beneath the ear. It feels like he can sense our fear, and is comforting us.
“It’ll make sense Scout, just bear with me.”
“Okay.”
“So, first off, the whole locked-in thing you went through, you went through that right?”
“Yes.”
“I figure that’s just what death normally feels like. Only reason it’s not known is, well, the only people who know aren’t talking any time soon. Aside, that is, from you and me. Well, maybe two or three others, but that’s not important right now.”
“So you’ve been dead too?”
“Oh yes. Not fun, is it?”
“And you came back.”
“Yes. Though not quite in the same fashion as you.”
“And I came back because...?”
“You drank... vampire blood.”
“What?”
“Man, I’d hoped that part would be obvious. Yes, vampire blood.”
“You’re a...”
“Siiii,” she says, nodding her head.
“But...”
“Come on, Scout. Analyze a bit. You’re good at that. I don’t have parents, this cigarette wand is from the twenties, I live in rainy, overcast Portland and speak with old sayings a lot of the time. Hell, Scout I just snapped a grown man’s neck and brought you back to life. I don’t think me being a vampire looks like a long shot today.”
“So wait. Does that mean I’m-”
“No. You’re not a vamp. Someone needs to have the blood of a vampire in them when they die in order to turn. Any amount at all, a drop is all it takes. You, however, did that in reverse. You, my friend, are merely a revenant.”
I don’t follow that well. I feel a bit like I’m in physics class, only absorbing some words without knowing what they mean. “And what exactly is that? A revenant?”
“Simply someone who returns from the dead. Don’t worry, otherwise you’re a perfectly normal human girl. I wasn’t so lucky when I died.”
Any other day, someone telling me about this sort of thing would get little more than snark. Death’s got a funny way of opening your mind to things. “Life as a vampire not all that?” I ask her.
“Hardly the cat’s meow.” She takes another puff on that cigarette before speaking again. “When you turn, whatever you were feeling at the time of your death is magnified. So if you were in pain, you feel that pain. If you were angry, you feel that anger, only worse. You follow?”
“Yes.”
“I died in a car crash. I was running down a street and a car came speeding down the road at just the wrong moment. At the moment I died, I felt the pain of two of my ribs snapping in half and puncturing my lungs. It’s a pain I’ve felt every day for eighty-five years, Scout. A horrible, horrible pain that would kill a human. But I can’t die. At least, not from something like that. So I’ve spent my days dealing with this... this curse.”
“Wow... Dodger I had no idea.”
“Why would you? ‘Oh, she must be a vampire’ isn’t really the first thing any sane person thinks of when thinking about a friend. Besides, I hide it best I can. Though it’s not just pain, either. Your entire personality can get magnified. I’m stuck in my twenties slang thanks to that. Though to be honest, slang was much better back then...”
The next half hour or so is spent with me rattling off question after question. I mean, when your best friend turns out to be a blood-sucking, life-bring-backing vampire, you naturally get kind of curious.
“Garlic?” I ask at one point, half joking.
“Vile little herb that would incapacitate me. Never give me anything with garlic.”
That makes me chuckle. But then comes the heavy stuff.
“Do you... you know...”
“Do I what, Scout?”
I pause for a long time, afraid of what the answer is going to be. “Do you feed?”
“No, I’ve somehow survived eighty years without drinking the thing I need most to stay alive. Come on, Scout. I wouldn’t ask you if you drank water.”
I press my hands to my temples and massage them, overwhelmed by it all.
Dodger speaks up, her voice softer. More consoling. “If it helps at all, I do try to find people either already dead or close to it.”
I don’t know if it does. I can’t really process any more. Maybe it will all make sense in the morning. Hell, life made sense just an hour ago. One hour ago, my life had been so different. Since then, I’ve seen a bus run over a man, who then got up unscathed and ran off, I’d died, come back to life, witnessed my best friend kill a man and discovered she was a vampire.
All in all, I’ve had worse days.
Act Two: Petrichor
Dodger walks me home. I’m still rattling off questions non-stop. Some of them she answers, some of them she dodges. No pun intended.
Her real name is Elizabeth, but she’s been going by Dodger for over ninety years, taking the name from
Oliver Twist
, and not the baseball team. Sunlight stings her, but it’s tolerable unless it’s the light of dawn or dusk.
The v-word keeps pounding on the walls of my mind. This whole scenario... It’s the kind of secret that leaves me itching to tell someone. I want to just go home to my mom and dad and say “hey guys, sorry I’m late. I died for a little while but luckily Dodger’s a vampire,” but something tells me that won’t exactly fly with them.
“Hey, you don’t turn into a bat do you? Are werewolves real too? Buffy?”
“No, no, and I hope not,” she says as we reach my front door. “Look, I’m not going anywhere. Find me at school tomorrow and ask me some more. Or just text me. For now, try to enjoy the rest of your night, okay?”
“Okay.” I ease my door open and walk inside, leaving Dodger with a wave. I live in a small, old house in an older district of Portland. Nothing special, nothing terribly insufferable about it. The inside of my house is pretty mundane, not much of note aside from a jeweled cross on the front wall, my father’s hunting rifle next to it, and an oil painting of a distant family member hangs by the staircase.
“I’m home! Sorry I’m late!” I hear footsteps pounding down the staircase and I know I’m either about to be embraced or scolded. Possibly both.
My mother reaches me first and envelops me in a hug. “Oh thank god you’re safe, Scout! Where were you? We tried calling and texting.”
“Oh... um, sorry. Phone must be off.” It wasn’t. I’d just forgotten to check it. The whole dying thing distracted me a bit.
“We saw the bus on the news and just got worried sick. What happened?”
“What?”
“The 10, right Scout? You take the 10 home?”
“Yeah.”
“We saw on the news it had crashed or something.”
“Oh! Yeah! It uh...”
Or something
is right. I hesitate, unsure of how much to tell. “It ran over a man. He, uh, he just came from nowhere.”
“But the bus looked totaled.”
“I know, I thought it was weird too.” My father comes down the stairs now. He’s a quiet man much like water. Very calm, but with a silent strength about him.
“Scout, what happened?” He asks.
“She says the bus ran over a man,” my mom says.
“Ran over a man?”
“Yeah, and somehow totaled the bus.”
“Scout, is that really what happened?” asks my dad.
“Yes, why would I lie about that?”
“No, you wouldn’t. So you walked home?”
“Yes.”
My mother motions to my father, and they take a few steps away and have a hushed conversation. I catch a few phrases here and there. “You don’t think...” “She’s not sixteen yet...” “We might need to...”
My dad breaks away and sits me down on the couch. The look in his eyes is intense. I can tell he’s willing himself to be calm.
“I need you to tell me
everything
that happened with that man, Scout. No matter how weird it sounds. You understand?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. Start.”
Something about the tone of his voice coaxes the unfiltered truth out of me. I spill everything about the bus crash. The dead man that wouldn’t die, the strangely forgetful bus driver, everything. For the moment, I leave out what happened
after
the crash. But even that won’t stay shelved indefinitely.
“I know it sounds crazy, dad,” I say when I finish. “But you said...”
“I know.”
“Should I call Hunter?” asks my mom.
“Better safe than sorry,” my dad replies.
Hunter is my uncle. My dad’s brother. No idea why they would need to call him, but it’s clear I’m about to have my second revelation of the day. Does this
have
to happen all at once? All I want right now is to have a normal life. Like I had last freaking morning. Is that so much to ask? To worry about boys and dances and grades and not... well...
this?
“Scout,” my dad says. “You know I don’t joke around often, right?”
“Yes you do.”
“Does this sound like my joking around voice?”
“No.”
“Good. Then I need you to pay very close attention to me now.”
“Okay, Dad.”
“What your mother and I think happened was...” he exhales deeply. He thinks I’m not going to believe him. He has no idea I already know what he’s going to say, and I play the fool for now.
“Was what, Dad?”
“We think it was a vampire.”
I know it would be easier if I come clean and told them what happened after the car crash. But something tells me saying this would only complicate what my father’s about to say about my life.
“A vampire?” I ask, trying to inject some surprise into it.
“Yes. You see Scout... your mother and I come from a long line of... okay Scout you have to know I wouldn’t lie or joke about this sort of thing.”
“Yeah just say it, Dad.”
“We- and also
you,
are a slayer.”
“What do you mean by that?” My pulse races. My heart’s swimming in stomach acid. I know exactly what he means, and yet I’m still hoping I’m wrong.
“It means, Scout, that your family hunts vampires.”
Yep, this would be my luck. My best friend’s a vampire, and I’m a slayer.
Fuck.
“Normally,” my dad continues, “we would hold off on telling you until you turned sixteen, but after what happened to that bus today, we can’t afford to have you in the dark any longer. If there’s a vampire out in Portland, then you need to know how to protect yourself.”
“So, what, am I gonna go to a karate class now or something?”
“No. You will learn what the slayers call
Interception
. It’s a mix of martial arts and weaponry...” he must’ve seen the worried look on my face because he followed this with “Don’t worry. We will teach you what you need to know.”
“Okay. But uh, can I ask you some stuff first?”
“Of course, darling.”
I see this as a perfect opportunity to ask questions I had been too scared to ask Dodger. How to kill a vampire. Apparently, all the old legends were correct. A wooden stake through the heart, says dad.
My father rises, and suddenly he appears to have grown. He seems stronger, powerful. He grabs my hand and pulls me to my feet and says “come with me. You need to start training.”
He leads me into his bedroom and stops beside his closet door. It suddenly hits me that the door is out of place. The wood is old and rough. The white paint fading and chipping and in stark contrast to the mellow mahogany color covering the other walls and doors of the room. He rests his hand on the closet doorknob and says “Before we begin, you must not tell anyone about any of this.”
“How come?” Stupid question.
“A good slayer is an unknown slayer,” and with that he opens the door, and it’s not a closet I see.
It’s a staircase.
There’s no clothes hung up or anything, just a dark, dusty staircase and a hole in the floor where it leads out. It appears to descend forever in the dark, further and further into oblivion.
“We have a basement...” I say. “That’s new.”
“New to you, Scout. But it’s very, very old.” He begins walking down, the wooden stairs creaking beneath his feet. He must notice my apprehension to it all, because he stops and says “you coming?”
“Yeah.” I try to make it confident, but my voice cracks. “On my way.”
My father reaches his hand into his pocket and retrieves something. I can’t quite make out what, but he runs his hand along the wall and grabs something else. There’s a burst of light and I see he’d grabbed a lighter and lit a torch that had been fixed on the wall.
“Why torches?” I ask. “And not lightbulbs?”
“Torches look cooler.” We start walking down again, and part of me wishes he hadn’t lit the torch, because now I can see all the spider webs on the basement ceiling and walls. The staircase smells of mildew and dust, and it makes me sneeze.
“Bless you.”
“Thanks. So, uh, why are we here?”
“Just a few more steps. Almost there.”
The temperature drops several degrees. I tighten Dodger’s jacket to combat it. Meanwhile, my father finishes the descent and enters the main room. He walks to the center, where a stand is waiting for his torch. He secures the torch to the stand and starts lighting other torches along the walls of the room. In a few moments, the whole room is lit. The light from the flickering fires makes my eyes work harder for every detail. The room is dusty and grey, with cobwebs strung about in the wall corners. The paint is peeling off in several places, and to my right are the water pipes. I can see there’s a large wooden crate tucked away in one corner of the room. My father walks over to it and pulls out two bows made from white ash. They don’t look like the bows I’m used to seeing in movies. It’s M shaped instead of crescent shaped. The ends are sharp, vaguely reminding me of horns.
“This is your primary weapon as a Slayer, Scout,” my father says. “It’s a reflex bow, which will be easier to shoot for you than a standard longbow. More power and mobility too.” He reaches back into the crate and pulls out six straight, smooth pieces of wood that have been whittled sharp at the ends. “These are your arrows. Notice they are only whittled to a point instead of there being an arrowhead. Do you know why?”
“Because vampires die from a wooden stake to the heart?”
“Exactly. Doesn’t need to be a stake per se, these will work too. Notice the ends of the bow are sharpened too. So you have something to use close range when you’re out of arrows.” He hands me the recurve bow and pulls out a second larger bow of the same kind for himself.
“Now watch me and take note of how to shoot. You’re left handed, right Scout?”
“Right.”
“Right?”
“Right.”
“I thought you were left-handed?”
“I am.”
“You just said... oh...”
“Right as in ‘correct,’ Dad.”
“My bad. Okay then, hold out your bow with your right arm. Lock your arm into place and make sure it’s straight out. No, not yet, watch me first.”
“Okay.”
“Okay now with your left hand, place the back end of an arrow on the string. Once it’s on, use your middle three fingers to draw the string back. Notice they don’t touch the arrow, instead they’re just beneath it. Draw it back and let your left hand become parallel to your ear. It’ll sting the first few times. You have to just get practice in. You want a glove for today?”
“Sure.”
He reaches back into the crate and hands me a glove that straps around my wrist and protects my fingers in coats of leather. Have to admit, I look pretty badass.
“Okay. Ready to try?”
“Yes.”
“Let’s just aim for the far wall there. Now get your bow ready.”
I try my best to mimic how my father looked when he held out the bow, but apparently it’s wrong because he adjusts my arm and has me raise the bow a little higher.
“Okay, I’ll string the arrow for you. But I want you to draw it back and fire when I tell you.”
“Okay.”
He rests my first arrow so that it nestles against the string and my index finger. He tells me to draw it back. I’m surprised by how hard it is. The first few inches are nothing too difficult, and then all of a sudden it’s like trying to pull a hunk of steel. My hand shakes from the tension.
“All right Scout let go,” my father says. I release the string, but I wasn’t able to draw it back very far and the arrow doesn’t fly so much as tumble. My father goes back to the crate and produces a smaller bow. He hands this to me and tells me to try again.
This attempt is easier. I draw the string back to my ear before it tenses up too much to go back any further. He has me aim for the far wall and fire. The arrow flies fast enough to hear the
whoosh
as it crosses the room and snaps in half upon contact with the wall.
“Good,” says my father. “A little underpowered perhaps, but you’ll get the hang of it.”
“Dad, can I ask something?”
“Of course.”
“Have you ever...
encountered
a vampire before?”
“Three or four, yes.”
“Have you ever killed one?” I ask.
“Three or four,” he replies, and smiles like he thinks he’s being funny. I’m not smiling. I think to myself if he ever found out about Dodger, only one of them would survive the encounter.