Dying Isn’t Just for the Young #4
As soon as she was out of the room, I took my chance. “I can’t stay here,” I told Keith, grabbing my dead phone off the nightstand. “I need to be away from the family before the hunger hits.”
He hesitated. He was used to doing what Diane said, and he had to know that Diane wouldn’t like it if I was gone.
“I don’t want to hurt the children,” I said, with as much gravitas as I could muster. “I can already feel it coming on.”
My daughter would never have married a particularly strong-willed man. Looking horrified, Keith nodded, went with me to the front door, and punched in the code.
“You’re going to be all right?” he asked, a ridiculous question. If this really were all true, I would definitely not be all right, but he needed absolution.
“Of course. You’re doing the right thing for them—and for me,” I reassured him as I headed toward the road.
As soon as the door shut, I hobbled as fast as I was able into some nearby bushes and cut through a yard into the stretch of woods that ran behind the homes.
I couldn’t move fast, and it wouldn’t be long before Diane noticed that if a vampire really had broken the glass on the window, the shards would be primarily inside the room instead of outside.
I cut across to another street and stayed off the road as much as possible. Inside brightly lit houses, I occasionally caught a glimpse of neighbors drawing their drapes. Then I heard a siren and veered off into a copse of trees.
A police cruiser stopped. One of the cops—a young woman in uniform—got out, looking up and down the road.
“They don’t die right away,” her partner said from inside the car. “But they move fast once they do. Let’s come back in the morning.”
“She’s not really infected, the lady said. She’s pretending.”
“Yeah,” the guy inside the car said sarcastically.
“A seventy-eight-year-old woman ran out into the night, long past curfew, without her cane, to play a prank on her daughter? Or what, she has dementia but is also a manipulative liar? Either the caller didn’t want to admit to herself that her mother’s infected or she thought we wouldn’t look as hard if we knew. I am going with the second.”
The young cop took one last look down the deserted street, got back in the car, and drove away.
The walk to a nearby gas station was grueling. By the time I got there, I’d managed to clean the blood off my neck using a backyard hose, so at least I didn’t look dangerous. Still, I am sure I looked deranged. The clerk blinked at me from behind bulletproof glass.
“You need me to call someone?” he asked.
“What I need, young man,” I told him, as sternly as a schoolteacher, “is a charger cable and fifteen minutes of grace. Do you think you can give that to me?”
“We’re not really allowed—” he started, but I’d already ripped open the box with the cable inside. He blinked at me balefully as I plugged it into the wall.
As it charged, I got myself painkillers, a new cane, a large coffee, and a Danish. Then I used Venmo to pay for my haul and called myself a Lyft.
“The Dead Last Rest Stop?” the driver asked when I got in, eyebrows raised.
“That’s right,” I told him.
It was a little after three when we got there. Floodlights washed the parking lot in a bright glow beneath a neon sign proclaiming the name of the structure. Despite the late hour, the Dead Last Rest Stop was obviously full of people.
Limping toward the front doors on sore feet, I felt a shocking burst of anger at Nigel for, of all things, not writing plays in which a person like me would ever do anything like what I just did.
I don’t know why that made me so furious. Perhaps because Nigel thought his plays were smarter because no one in them did anything epic or strange or loud. Everything was toned down, representing the small moments of real lives.
Except sometimes, it turned out, real lives could be really fucking melodramatic.
Inside, I walked across black polished floors, past screens broadcasting Lucien Moreau’s Eternal Ball along with other popular Coldtown feeds, to the information kiosk.
A map showed the offerings—rental showers, coffin-shaped pods to sleep in, lockers, restaurants, bars, a salon, and various boutiques selling long black column dresses with fluttery sleeves as well as a great deal of velvet.
And the place I was looking for—a FedEx ShipCenter.
I went to the desk, gave them the tracking number, and got my package from Harry.
It was large and long and difficult to rip open.
Inside was a vintage leather suitcase that had belonged to me for a long time and a more modern, cheap duffel.
There was also a beautiful cane with mother-of-pearl roses and a note attached.
A gift from Harry. “For your new life,” he wrote, which was very sweet.
Inside the duffel were several envelopes of cash and the clothing I’d asked for. One of my black suits with a skirt, a favorite pin, a hat, and earrings. The shoes I’d requested weren’t particularly practical, but they were very nice.
I changed in the showers. From a kitschy souvenir shop, I got a package of water-purifying pills and several overpriced tins of food—two things I’d heard were prized inside.
The floppy-haired blond boy behind the register stared at me with wide eyes. “You’re not going inside, are you?” he asked, clearly taken aback.
“What?” I asked him. “You think dying is just for the young?”
He blinked in surprise, then took my hundred-dollar bill and counted out my change without further comment.
Outside, I spotted a girl with hair dyed flame red walking toward her car, a lacy black parasol over her shoulder. The mascara under her eyes had run a bit, as though from tears.
“Heading to the gates?” I called after her.
“Yes,” she said defensively, frowning. “What’s it to you?”
“I’ll give you fifty dollars if you give me a ride,” I told her.
“Oh,” she said, taken aback. “Okay. Sure. Hop in.”
On the drive, the girl—Margot, she called herself—told me about her reasons for wanting to enter a Coldtown. A girlfriend and a bad breakup and a dead-end job. As she talked, she kept wiping her eyes and apologizing for crying.
“There’s nothing to be sorry for,” I said. “You’re young. You’re supposed to love hard and be devastated when the person you love turns out to suck.” I told her a little about being young in New York and Nigel and some of his affairs. I told her how she seemed smart and funny and kind.
By the time we got to the gates, she’d decided she wasn’t going inside after all. I was relieved to hear it. I left her the cheap duffel bag with my pajamas, slippers, and five thousand dollars inside. I hope it helped.
The de-registration paperwork was perfunctory and dull. It ought to have felt profound, to sign my name to something like that, giving up my rights. But by then it didn’t feel like anything at all.
“No one is going to turn you,” a guard said, looking me over. “You look like a nice old granny, but those vampires—they don’t even want the young, hot chicks. They just want blood.”
“Well,” I said. “I suppose you have everything figured out.”
Once it was done, I passed through several heavy doors, then into a cagelike elevator. As they lowered me, I could see the whole city sprawled out before me in all its hungry glory.
I’d seen it on the news, but it was different to be there in person.
The smashed windows. The burnt husks of cars.
Elaborate graffiti covered the walls, paintings of dragons and other, darker things.
From inside the buildings, I could tell that Coldtown’s citizens were watching, to see if I was worth bothering with.
I took the cane top and pulled it up, exposing two inches of the steel sword encased inside. Truly, Harry gave the best presents.
After that, I managed to pay for directions with the water-purifying pills and tins of food, then headed directly to Lucien Moreau’s Eternal Ball.
There was a wait at the door, but an ancient crone stooped over a cane was exotic enough to get waved inside—especially after I produced a small bribe to sweeten the deal.
One thing about spending so much time among playwrights is that I have observed a lot of negotiations over the years. Vampires had good reasons not to make more vampires, but I had three things that most other candidates for vampirism didn’t.
One, I had a lot of money in a suitcase. Cash, which was hard to come by inside and useful if you wanted to buy things from the guards, which everyone did.
Two, I had access to enough entertainment contacts that I could get some real promotion going for a deserving livefeed, not to mention the potential for better distribution.
Three, I had the presence of mind to hide the suitcase so that when I made the offer, the vampire couldn’t just kill me and take it. Truly, some people really ought to watch more British crime dramas.
June 24, 2014
This will be my last entry, I think. Tonight, I can’t stop thinking of Nigel’s question: What would you do differently if you had a chance to live your life over again?
I can’t stop thinking of David speaking at Nigel’s celebration of life. Living well is the best revenge.
Let’s turn that cliché on its head, my darling child. Dying well is the best revenge. It’s mine, anyway.
I stare at the reflection of my own red eyes in the glass and smile.
What would I do differently? Let’s find out.