Chapter 1 #2
“Pleasure doing business with you, my friend,” Crystal said, shaking that big sweaty hand. “Gentleman and a scholar, what-what. Pip pip! Cheerio!” She tipped an imaginary hat and Mickey frowned at her, seeming confused. “Sorry,” Crystal muttered. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Okay,” Mickey said. “Thanks!” Crystal helped him load up the last of his tuna and vodka on a dolly and then he was gone, the door shut behind him with the clicks of five locks.
Crystal spun around and smiled slyly to herself. Yes, that had been good. She lit herself a second cigarette. They were a finite resource, but she thought she deserved it.
“Damn, Crys,” Jet said, clinging to Nina as they shuffled into the room where a new tower of meds had sprung up. She’d checked bottles from every single box to make doubly sure she was not, in fact, the one getting cheated. “You cleaned up.”
“Well, the doctors did, anyway,” Crystal muttered to herself around her cigarette.
Her stomach rumbled, and she grimaced. “Where are those crackers? And that fake cheese stuff? I want some salmon on crackers and…” She grabbed a bottle of vodka from one of the crates that had not been traded that morning. “Breakfast of champions.”
Minutes later, the three of them were sitting around the small TV hooked up to a DVD player, all running on the generator since the electricity was being a dick today.
“Can we watch Batman?” Jet said. He and Nina sat cross-legged on a blanket, a tray in front of him full of delights; salmon, crackers, fake cheese, freeze-dried strawberries, gummy bears, a jar of sweet pickles.
They always asked her permission to watch things.
They asked her permission for everything.
She was the de facto leader of the condo.
That was probably because she had found the place, knew how to sniff out food, and how to avoid rogue vamps.
She was generally savvy. She had survived this long, after all.
They trusted her. That was a relief. If they hadn’t, she would’ve had to whip them into shape and that could be tedious.
“Which Batman?” Crystal said, around a mouth full of crackers.
They had a big shelf of DVDs. The Batman collection was mostly for the benefit of Jet and Nina, both of them huge nerds.
At night when nobody could sleep because they heard fresh rumors that “the Lucian were on the move,” Nina and Jet told old comic book stories they remembered from childhood in the dark while Crystal was still up, logging everything she’d traded and marked on detailed maps where she had found what and who lived where.
It was her obsessive hobby. Now, because of their insomnia, she knew all about A Death in the Family and Knightfall and A Court of Owls.
“Um…” Jet bit his lip and blinked at her.
If she didn’t know him, it could be hard not to write him off as another Mickey.
But Jet wasn’t stupid. He was actually brilliant and so was Nina.
As far as tech and engineering went. Despite Crystal’s position as leader of the group, she knew very well she wouldn’t have gotten this far without them. “Animated Series.”
“Anything with Harley Quinn,” Nina said, leaning on his shoulder. “I love Harley Quinn.”
Crystal pretended this was a great hardship because it might mean she warranted a favor later and said, “Alright. Alright, fine. But just two episodes.”
They both clapped their hands and Crystal crawled over to the shelf and found the DVD and minutes later they were feasting and watching Batman.
It was not the worst way to spend the quasi-breakfast hour.
Or perhaps, Crystal thought, they could call it brunch.
There was no ice, tragically. They had a freezer they only used for emergencies, but it did a number on the generator and power from the grid was still too unreliable to bother with the luxury of ice for cocktails.
But Crystal knew she wouldn’t care about that once she was buzzed. She crawled over to the crate of canned tomato juice and after rooting around for a couple of minutes, she found the dried horseradish, Worcestershire sauce, and Tabasco.
“Yesss,” Crystal hissed. The Bloody Mary was spicy and a little disgusting when warm but sure enough, after a couple of sips, she really didn’t care. Probably because it was mostly vodka.
“That’s gross,” Nina said, nodding at her drink as she spread salmon on a cracker.
“I’ll have you know this drink contains all the essential vitamins and nutrients someone needs,” Crystal said before stuffing the cracker in her mouth.
“Like what?” Jet said, around a mouth full of cheese.
Crystal swallowed and said, “Eighty proof, my friend. Eighty proof.”
Nina wasn’t so discerning as to make herself a mixed cocktail. Instead, she poured herself just a finger of vodka and took a small sip, her face twisting up in disgust before she took a second. “Bleh!”
“No one said it would be easy,” Crystal muttered.
“Are we taking the meds to the doctors then?” Nina said.
“Yeah,” Crystal said. “And we gotta get around before dark. For sure.”
There were different ways to get around Chicago at night and some were safer than others.
Crystal knew the sewers and sometimes they were a good option if things were particularly dangerous.
When word came around that the Lucian might be coming (for sure, this time), Nina insisted on getting around by sewer.
Crystal had not decided what she thought about the likelihood of a Lucian threat.
They were supposedly the enemy of the Vampyren.
Lither than Vampyren but just as tall and hairy, equally as strong, and with larger canine-type teeth that could rip your throat out before you knew what was happening.
Werewolf-like, people said, and even more dangerous when the moon was out.
But she had never seen one. Somehow the Lucian were always just about to strike. For sure, this time. They were coming, and they’d slaughter vamp and human alike. It all sounded like a bullshit story to her. Maybe it was even a story invented by the Vampyren to keep the humans in line.
Oh, ya think we’re bad? You just wait!
Anyway, that made more sense than the alternative; as bad as things had been, they could get even worse, and just as life was settling into something akin to a routine too.
“Should we be drinking?” Jet said, sounding tentative.
He had anxiety issues. It was too bad, Crystal thought, that old Mickey didn’t have any Xanax on hand.
That might have come in handy too. But booze functioned almost as well.
“I mean if there’s something out there when we go?
” He was gnawing on his fingernails, his dark brown eyes fixed on Crystal who was taking another sip of her cocktail before knotting her long, black hair into a bun on top of her head, miraculously fixed with a single pin (one had to be efficient these days). “Should we be drinking?”
“We better,” Crystal said, knocking back the rest of her Bloody Mary as she considered a third cigarette. “I’m sure as hell not goin’ out there sober.”