Under Darkness Part 9

Audrey had rejoined us by this time. "What's this about going over to Martin's place?"

"It seems he's missing," I said. "I think we all all should go." should go."

Audrey looked over at the blue neon clock. "Sure. The race for the blood doesn't start for a couple more hours."

Ten minutes later the five of us stood shoulder-to-shoulder in the poorly lit, dank hallway on the sixth floor of a c.r.a.ppy walk-up tenement on East Fourth Street. A lot of Eastern European immigrants must have moved into the neighborhood. The place stank of boiled cabbage.

Rogue pounded on Martin's front door with his fist. "Martin! Hey, buddy! You there?"

No one answered. Instead a door opened at the far end of the hall. A tiny, white-haired woman wearing a babushka appeared. She was holding a butcher knife in one hand and a crucifix in the other. I knew what she was. I had seen her kind before.

"Get out of here! All of you. I call nine-one-one!" she said in her wavering crone's voice.

"It's okay, bubbie," Rogue said. "We're friends of his."

"You no friends. Get out!"

At that point I did what I had done before under similar circ.u.mstances. I smiled at the old lady widely enough to show my fangs. Then I hissed at her, drawing out my Ss and sounding exactly like what I was: a vampire. "Gypssssy, thisss isss not your businesssssss."

The butcher knife dropped from her hand to the floor. "Aaaiiiee! Strega Strega!" she cried out, and shook her crucifix at me as she backed into her apartment. The door slammed shut. I heard the dead bolt slide into place.

Rogue pounded on Martin's door again. "Martin! Martin, buddy! You in there?"

I heard rustling from within. Locks were being opened. I heard the floor brace being moved. The door opened a crack. The security chain was on. Martin's white face appeared in the opening. "Huh?" He squinted. The man looked s.h.i.t-faced drunk. "Whadda you want?"

Benny cried out. "Marty, thank the Lord. Are you okay?"

"Hol' on a min'it," Martin said, slurring his words. He closed the door to take off the chain. Then it opened again. "Come on in."

The five of us squeezed into his vestibule. Martin, unsteady on his feet and seemingly moving with some pain, led the way to a tiny living room that was so dark I could barely see the furniture.

"You wanna drink?" he offered. Clearly, from the half dozen empty bottles on the coffee table and the stench of stale booze in the air, he had already had one or two-or twenty.

n.o.body said yes. Obviously we had interrupted one h.e.l.l of a binge.

"Sorry to bother you. When you didn't show up at the club last night people got worried," Rogue said.

"You didn't answer your phone either," Benny added. "I called."

"Sorry 'bout that. I didn't feel like talking. Too freaked out." Martin rubbed his fingers into his eyes. "I don't usually drink this much. I didn't know what else to do 'bout the situation."

"What do you mean?" Benny said, taking it personally, I could tell.

"I nearly got staked. Last night on my way to the club."

Benny gave me an I-told-you-so look.

I ignored her reproach and asked Martin to tell us what happened.

The wiry, boyish vampire-he looked young, though he was probably pushing two hundred or so-sat down gin- gerly in a chair and put his face in his hands. "Closest I ever came to... you know." He looked up at us with bleary eyes and started to tell his story.

Martin said he had left his apartment at dusk, just as he did every night. His routine consisted of going to the Laundromat and hanging out until the nightly blood race. This evening was the same as all the rest. He lived only a few blocks from the club. As usual, he walked, taking his time, looking around for potential victims who might be foolish enough to be loitering in this neighborhood. He picked up the Post Post at a newspaper kiosk, since he preferred its sudoku to the at a newspaper kiosk, since he preferred its sudoku to the Times Times crossword. It helped pa.s.s the time, he added wearily. crossword. It helped pa.s.s the time, he added wearily.

Pa.s.sing time was something vampires did a lot of.

Martin had nearly reached the Laundromat-he was maybe a half block from it-when he noticed this big guy on the other side of Second Avenue, leaning back against a storefront, watching the street. The man had dressed all in black leather on this hot night, wrapped chains around one arm, and looked like the villain half of a WWF tag team.

Martin didn't pay him any special attention at first. Sure, the guy looked weird, but this was the East Village. Nine out of ten people looked weird.

All of a sudden the guy pushed himself upright, ran toward the street, jaywalked through the traffic as horns honked and brakes squealed, and started racing toward Martin. Martin reacted with sangfroid, unconcerned, even a little pleased. If the guy wanted a fight, no problem. The burly WWF wannabe was about to tangle with a vampire.

Then, in his peripheral vision, Martin spotted another leather-clad ugly dude coming down the block toward him from the other direction. Martin took a better look and saw a long, pointed wooden stake in the ugly dude's hand. Martin swung his eyes back toward the first guy. He was armed with a similar device.

Vampire hunters, holy s.h.i.t! Time to get the h.e.l.l out of here, he thought.

With escape cut off from the front and behind, Martin went the only way he could: into the nearest doorway. He felt panic and real fear for the first time in his vampire existence, and his heart was thudding in his chest.

Fortunately Martin, a native New Yorker, knew that particular tenement well. The first-floor hall served as a pa.s.sageway that cut through the building and exited into a rear courtyard. A three-story colonial-era structure sat there, freestanding, decrepit, but still in use. A writer friend of Martin's had lived in its tiny first-floor flat a decade before.

The old building's fire escape ladder hung down within reach. Martin snagged it and swung himself up. He quickly climbed toward the roof of the old building, fast, but not fast enough.

As Martin pulled himself up the rusted iron rungs of the decaying ladder, one of the hunters took a swipe at him with the stake. It missed his heart. It buried itself in his cute little b.u.t.t.

That was my characterization. Martin actually said, "The f.u.c.king piece of s.h.i.t got me in the a.s.s."

Martin reached the roof, kicked his closest pursuer in the teeth, transformed into bat form, and flew skyward. He came in the window of his apartment and had been holed up there ever since, afraid to venture out again.

"As soon as my b.u.t.t's healed-by tomorrow, I guess-I'm going to get out of town. I'm afraid they're watching my building. I don't know how they found the Laundromat. I didn't even sleep today. I'm scared to close my eyes. I want to head to someplace safe. Maybe Portland. The West Coast, anyway."

That piece of news dropped on Benny like bird guano. Her mouth twisted downward, her face clearly reflecting her distress at the abrupt end to her dreams of snagging Martin.

Guess who she was going to blame? I jumped in with the first idea that popped into my head.

"Martin, let's not be hasty. We've got our full Darkwing team here. How about we go out and reconnoiter, see what we can do? Running's not the answer. These guys are going to get somebody else if they're not stopped. If they've targeted the Laundromat, we're going to lose a lot of New York's vampires."

I turned to the other Darkwings. "What are your feelings on this?"

"I say we get them before they get us," Rogue said.

Audrey hesitated. "I'm not that good. Fighting. Physical stuff, I mean."

Rogue said, "Time you got a taste for it. All you need is practice."

"I'm down for it," Cormac said.

"Good," Rogue responded. "If they're watching for Martin or the other club regulars, they're probably lurking around nearby. I say we split into two groups. Cormac, you take Audrey and Benny and cover the streets on the West Side, looking for any hunters on the streets. Daphne and I will hit the East Side."

Huh? I thought. Why did he want to team up with me? Maybe he needed a break from being the Oscar Madison half of the odd couple.

Meanwhile mixed emotions chased across Cormac's face. No doubt he'd rather be paired up with Rogue, but he was being put in charge of a squad by his idol. He couldn't exactly argue.

Martin hobbled over to the window he used for his aerial exits and threw it open wide. The window led to a narrow air shaft where the air hung hot and fetid. Stinking garbage lay on the ground six stories down. We'd have use our wings and feet to clamber vertically up the bricks to the roof and then take flight.

Oh, that's going to be fun, I thought.

Preparing to transform, we all removed our clothes without hesitation or shame. All of us were focused on the transfiguration about to take place. Entering a fugue state, a place of no consciousness, the b.u.t.terfly in the chrysalis about to break free, we would begin to change.

But the room was too small to hold us all in bat form, so the A-team of Benny, Audrey, and Cormac went first. Their energy whirled into a vortex that generated enough static to make my hair bristle. A kaleidoscope of colors danced on the walls. The three human forms disappeared within columns of light. Then the light died, the sound of rustling wings burst forth, and in a blast of wind and sound three bats appeared, larger than human and strangely, utterly beautiful.

All were sleek and pelted with fantastic fur that refracted light like hundreds of tiny prisms. Their faces remained recognizable except that their eyes were no longer human, but the huge orbs of the species. Audrey, lanky and gray with a prominent nose, best resembled Geoffroy's Rousette fruit bat. Cormac was clearly a large flying fox, and Benny, golden and glistening, took on the guise of an Asian yellow house bat.

Yet they were not bats at all. They were creatures of myth and wonder, monsters to be feared, yet mesmerizing to any human who fell into their path and then, quaking in terror, felt their kiss and the flow of rich, red blood that followed.

Out the window each of them went, crawling batlike up the wall toward the black city sky.

Rogue and I changed then. For me it was a setting free of every emotion that I suppressed. With each violent transformation I became my inner self, my shadow self, the part of me I hated and yet the part of me that I suspected was the truest, the most real.

Euphoric with my power, reveling in my animal prowess, I nevertheless retained enough human reason to grab my backpack containing my gun and sling it over my head. A vampire's claws penetrate flesh, but bullets do it better.

I hopped onto the sill. I paused for a moment before I reached out to feel the rough bricks. I began the climb, now a fearsome thing ascending up the wall. Within moments I reached the roof. I spread my wings wide and, with a mightly thrust, left behind the bonds of earth and the asphalt rooftop.

Rogue's great black shape appeared behind me. With the distinctive flitting and swooping of the chiropteran, we stayed just above the rooftops, black forms against a black sky and therefore nearly invisible.

We headed downtown to the Bowery, continued as far as Ca.n.a.l Street, then doubled back. We reconnoitered the streets in Soho, then followed the traffic on Houston for a few blocks until we returned to Greenwich Village. We flew north above Sixth Avenue, made a sharp right at Eighth Street, circled around the strange black cube statue at Cooper Union, and kept going east toward the river.

We didn't see anybody suspicious until we reached Tompkins Square Park at Seventh Street and Avenue A.

A stand of towering American elm trees had survived Dutch elm disease in this unlikely refuge. Illuminated by the streetlights, they cast long shadows across the sidewalk. I hovered for a moment near them, cognizant of their majesty and rarity. And then I remembered the things that had happened in this small city park.

I circled the top of the Hare Krishna Tree. Beneath this elm in the summer of 1966, the beat poet Allen Ginsberg and the Swami Prabhupada chanted Hare Krishna and began a movement. After that, many people called the park sacred.

The junkies called it a place to score: heroin mostly, some meth, some c.o.ke. Then the homeless moved in.

Two decades later a bunch of gays started Wigstock, a daylong drag festival in the park, and in the 1990s the park was closed down for two years to get rid of the homeless and gentrify the place.

I had been an eyewitness to its colorful past. I had seen these strange and wondrous things unfold. I was among the girls in India-cotton dresses mid boys in bell-bottoms because of my mother.

Mar-Mar had embraced the counterculture of the Village beginning with Kerouac and the beats in the 1950s. She found her stride and total acceptance during the Summer of Love. She developed a habit of smoking marijuana. She intoned poetry on the subways. She marched against the war, for free love, for poverty programs, and for equality. She formed a woman's group, the Night Birds.

She went to consciousness-raising meetings holding Mao's Little Red Book. She became a member of SDS and ran the streets with Kathy Boudin and Mark Rudd. She broke completely with the Weathermen over the use. of violence before they started building bombs, but in other ways she tried to implement the revolutionary ideas she had held for at least five hundred years.

Through the 1970s she fought on, although the movement faded away. She considered Reaganomics a personal affront and redoubled her efforts to help the homeless, one of her deepest concerns.

On the night of August sixth, in 1988, she convinced me to come along with her to Tompkins Square Park. She and some other political activists were gathering to protest attempts to move out the homeless. I think she knew what was going to happen and wanted to "raise my consciousness" She was always doing s.h.i.t like that to me.

Now, as I glanced down on the still, silent park below, I remembered the riot that broke out between the cops, the homeless, Mar-Mar, and some of her lefty friends-and me. Nightsticks knocked heads, tear gas went off, people screamed, everybody ran. The television cameras rolled. I saw myself on NBC Nightly News NBC Nightly News the next day: A cop had me by the hair and I was kicking him in the shins. the next day: A cop had me by the hair and I was kicking him in the shins.

I got a little banged up, and forty-four other people were injured, some pretty seriously. Everybody screamed police brutality. A couple of cases went to court. n.o.body got convicted. Nothing changed.

Right after that my mother gave up her Christopher Street apartment and moved to Scarsdale. I never quite figured out why, except that the incident broke her heart in a way. I think that was when she decided to shift tactics to change the world. She become a manipulator within the government instead of a protester against it.

I often wondered why the top intelligence bosses trusted my mother to run their black ops. Who did they think they were dealing with? Didn't they know Mar-Mar had been a yippie? She once kept Abbie Hoffman's phone number on her speed dial. I guess they did know-and didn't care. The ends justified the means.

As I was woolgathering and not paying attention to anything on the ground, Rogue gave me a bat whistle.

He pointed down at Avenue B on the east side of the park. I saw two large men, big as brick s.h.i.thouses. They stood by a sign that read, TO REPORT A PROBLEM, TO LEARN WHAT WE DO, OR TO VOLUNTEER, CALL 1-800-555-PARX.

Before I knew it Rogue was diving straight at them. He hit one vampire hunter with his feet and sent the bruiser sprawling. Then Rogue landed and started hand-to-hand combat with the other hunter.

I figured I'd better watch Rogue's back. I swooped down on the guy who had gone a.s.s-over-teakettle. The big lug had gotten to his feet and pulled a stake from his bandolier. I came somersaulting in from above and pulled the weapon from his grasp with a tearing hiss. I landed, turned, and flung it toward the Hare Krishna Tree, giving the instrument of death over to karma and the G.o.ds.

Suddenly something hard and weighted hit me in the head. Lights danced in my brain. The world went out of focus. I refused to give in to the darkness. I shook it off and spun around to see what had beaned me.

A third vampire hunter was emerging from under the elms twenty feet away. He must have thrown a sock with a roll of coins or a bar of soap inside.

Suddenly I had two hunters to deal with.

Rogue was busy slugging it out with his opponent. No help was forthcoming from that quarter, and I was in trouble. The first hunter had regained his bearings and lumbered toward me like a Sherman tank. The guy who came out from the shadows beneath the trees started closing in. I had to even the odds.

I did. I swung my backpack around and reached inside for my gun. With its laser guidance system I couldn't miss, though at this close range I could have used a snub-nose revolver and hit my target. I fired off two shots at my closest a.s.sailant. He went down without uttering a sound. I whipped around, steadied my hand, and shot the other vampire hunter, who had already turned to run. Too little, too late. The bullet hit him in the back of the head, and his skull exploded.

The noise got the attention of the last remaining vampire hunter. I couldn't shoot him, though. Rogue was in the way. Since his mama didn't raise no fool, Rogue twisted to the side, fell to the ground, and I squeezed off another two rounds. Ping Ping-a bullet hit the vampire hunter's bandolier. Pong Pong... it went through the guy's leather jacket somewhere in the vicinity of his heart. He sank to his knees and pitched forward.

My hand was shaking when I slipped the Beretta back in my Louis Vuitton. Rogue was standing now. He looked at the carnage around us, looked at me, and grinned.

"Nice work, Rambo," he said.

Afraid that the sounds of the gunshots would bring the cops, we took off skyward in great haste, leaving the dead hunters where they lay in a pool of blood. The dark red liquid radiated from beneath the bodies, flowed across the sidewalk, and dripped into the gutter.

I smelled it when I began to fly away. The odor filled my throat. It reminded me how much I needed some blood of my own-and soon.

Rogue must have been affected too. He flew close to me, his eyes looking crazy. "I've got something I got to do," he called out, then veered off.

I went in his general direction, not following him really, but heading back to Fourth Street. I had to return to Martin's open window to retrieve my clothes. Rogue was a block or so in front of me when I saw him fold his wings behind his back and go into a dive.

I flew faster, driven by curiosity and fear. I arrived just in time to watch what he did, and my heart beat wildly at the sight.

Four stories below me, a girl with long blond hair and pale white skin sat alone on the stoop of a run-down brown-stone. She was smoking a cigarette, blowing the smoke out before her in lazy streams. A breeze wafted soft and warm, and the girl-she was perhaps seventeen-wore only shorts and a halter top. Maybe she wanted to escape her stuffy tenement rooms. Maybe she'd had a fight with her boyfriend or her mother. Whatever the cause, she was preoccupied with her thoughts. Foolishly she was not paying attention to the horror that was descending from above her.

And so the young girl did not see the evil coming down for her that night until it was too late.

A shadow pa.s.sed over her. She looked up and jumped frantically to her feet. She backed up, her hands feeling behind her for the door. But there was no escape as the large, dark batlike creature landed before her. I saw terror suffuse her face. She opened her mouth to scream.

No scream came. I heard only a small sound, truncated, and silenced quickly as Rogue's hand shot out and grabbed her face, covering her mouth. His other hand encircled her arm, pulling her to him, pressing her against his unyielding body.