Chapter 4

Out of either boredom or chumminess, Ms. White once told me about her resurrection.

It was more like waiting, really.

Sleeping, yes, but waiting as well. Eventually your conscious brain would kick in, in lieu of all other life patterns ceasing.

Death, for her, was more like a coma.

She couldn’t feel her physical body, but she was occasionally conscious enough to stare at the ceiling and count the cracks, or watch small insects and animals scurry overhead. Sometimes she watched cobwebs form.

But then without much else to do, she’d drift back into unconsciousness. (Or, more like “under consciousness,” she would later come to think of it as.) Sometimes it would be like REM sleep, where she would “dream,” and let her mind run away with itself. Other times she would be alone in her mind, giving her time to sort through her memories, thought, ideas, et cetera, like one huge filing cabinet.

So it was a great relief when the day of her resurrection finally came. She got up, stretched, scratched and vomited.

“Ugh, ugh… Oh God,” she half pleaded, feeling decades of debris and decay rise up from and out of her. “Teach me to die with my mouth open…”

It might have been strange that she was not immediately concerned with the fact that she had just been raised from the dead after being publicly executed by hanging , wrapped in a shroud, and lain in a crypt, except for the fact that she had already ruminated on the situation for what seemed like a century. So when she first woke up, her first concern was retching up whatever the catacomb had buried into her stomach, and not so much the fact that she wasn’t the only alive one in her tomb.

She was too busy hacking like a diseased feline to even notice them walk up to her, their shadows tracing long arches against the stone walls, dancing at the whim of the torches that tried to light the gloom of the place. A little girl and an old man, bending over her as she wretched. The little girl held back her hair, scraggled though it was, away from the vomit and as the bouts slowed, the old man offered her a handkerchief.

“Poor girl. It’s never easy on anyone, but it looks like you’ve had a particularly bad time of it.” The old man shook his head in sympathy as she wiped the grime from her face. By the time she was through, the white fabric was a dark, mottled black.

She had questions, questions she had debated in her mixed consciousness. Was he still alive? What had happened to him? He was probably dead after all this time, she had reasoned it out so that when she woke up, she wouldn’t care anymore. She couldn’t care. But still she had to know.

“The minister of this parish-“

“Dead, my dear. All dead. Everyone you ever knew or loved has been dead for a long, long time. They all lived their lives, now you have to live yours. I am sorry. So sorry.”

She was ready for this. A century of semi-thought, and still she cried. It was fucking pathetic, she said. He was a dick. The biggest dick she ever knew. She was used, and yet, still there she was, crying over his dead, rotting bones in a grim crypt, an old man giving her another clean kerchief and an eight year old girl wrapping her little arms around her chest in a tight hug while her head lay against her tattered and ruined dress.

--

Ms. White was covered in blood. Not in the conventional sense of having a lot of blood on her. As in I could no longer see her skin, hair, or token white dress beneath the blood. She was completely covered.

“Uhm.” I began, hesitantly.

“Oh! Hey. What’s up?” She asked cheerily. She was smiling happily.

“Hm. Uhm. Well. You’ve…. You’ve got some... stuff…” I gestured towards my own body, making a ‘wiping’ gesture.

“What?” She followed my hand, wiping off a little of the blood, revealing more blood beneath it, though not so fresh. She examined her fingertips quizzically.

“Oh? This? Just some blood.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why are you covered in blood?”

“Oh, I have to bathe myself in the blood of virgin’s to keep my unholy beauty, don’tcha know?”

“Really?”

She laughed, “No. Not really. Kidding, kidding.”

I had been having a good night until White called me. Not that I minded being called up at 3 AM, that sort of thing just came with the territory. I did mind being interrupted from sex. Somehow, I knew that White enjoyed wrecking my evening, and was further enjoying not telling me why the hell she had called me down to this abandoned project housing. But I wasn’t going to let it ruin my mood. I liked White, and even though she was acting kind of bitchy, I knew she was in a good mood; which was usually a good sign. Or, a very, very bad sign. Depends on how you view the situation, I guess.

“So… why’d you call me?”

She acted as if she just realized that she had, indeed, called me down here, and that our meeting was not a coincidence.

“Oh! Yes. Well, I had some work for you to do, but I went ahead and took care of most of it.” She motioned generally around the room with a sub-machine gun she was holding.

“Uhm. What were you doing?”

“Hm? Oh! Right. Here!” She tossed me a pair of what looked like red-tinted sunglasses. I caught them easily and put them over my eyes. Looking through them, it appeared as if the ground was littered with dead bodies, all in varying states of whole-ness. Most had at least one limb hacked off and were oozing a black blood from the wounds. The walls were covered with an arterial spray, and the ceiling postivily dripped with the stuff.

I took them off.

Then put them back on.

And took them off again.

“Cool, huh?” White asked.

“Sure. I guess. So… what’s the deal?”

“Well, I got a call about some demons-”

“Demons?”

“Yeah. Oh, right. You haven’t dealt with them yet. Nasty fuckers. Usually we have the Sampsons deal with them. Can’t see them without the glasses. Cainite brand stuff. Anyway, usually they keep a pretty low profile. Occasionally they’ll pop up like this, and I always like to get the chance to chop them up into tiny little pieces when they do.”

White seemed to be contemplating something. I fiddled with the sunglasses a bit.

“Still. It’s weird. We should probably go see the Old Man. See if he’s heard anything.”

“Who?”

White wasn’t inclined to answer my questions. She walked right by me, still off in her own little world.

“Where’d you park?”

“Ohhhh no, you’re not getting my ride covered in that stuff. The seat’s are leather.” White glared at me, and started to scrub at her skin, bits of the dark red blood flaking off of her and disappearing into thin air. Putting on the glasses, I could see they weren’t really disappearing, but apparently they only showed up on skin without the sunglasses. She was growing more and more frustrated as there seemed to be layers and layers to the stuff. After five minutes, she had made little progress and I sighed.

“You know what? Never mind. I can clean the car out later.”

White smiled happily, “You sure you don’t mind? I don’t want to fuck up your car.” I will say this about White, she did respect other people’s property.

“It’s cool. It looks like it doesn’t flake off that easily. It probably won’t be too bad. But if we’re gonna go see someone, we better stop off and get you a shower.

“Your place, please. Aaron’s a light sleeper.”

I beeped the car alarm off, “Right. Come on, we’ll get you cleaned up.”

Presently White grinned widely and grabbed onto my arm, pulling me toward her and hanging off of me a bit.

“What now?”

“I wuv you THIIIIIS MUCH, Black!” She squeezed me tightly in a hug that would probably have cracked a normal person’s ribs. I hadn’t seen her like this before. Not this friendly. I began to get worried.

Very, very worried.

Back at my apartment, White deposited a black, corked wine bottle that seemed to have something constantly swirling around in it before flouncing off to my bathroom for a shower.

“What’s in the bottle?”

“What!?” She shouted over the sound of the water and through the door. I was outside, putting a guest towel on the floor.

“The BOTTLE on the COUNTER!”

“OH!”

“THAT’S DEMON BLOOD!”

“WHAT!?”

“DEMON BLOOD!”

“I… WHY?”

“TRY SOME!”

“WHAT!?”

“TRY SOME.”

So I did. And suddenly the whole world became a much brighter, friendlier, happy place. I felt like I could run a marathon, fly across the world in a minute, or summon pure glee in a sex-filled manner to thousands upon thousands of women in a single night.

I don’t really remember much of the rest of the night. Apparently Demon Blood is catnip to vampires. White had harvested some to sell to some Cainites. Apparently they really liked the stuff. In all honesty, I didn’t think it was that bad either. I dunno. I don’t really have an addictive personality.

--

Vampires have very few expenses. We don’t eat or drink food, and we were only up and about for about a third of the day, so we didn’t really spend a lot of money. Which worked out, since we couldn’t exactly get jobs.

But, we did need money for some things. Rent. Weaponry. Lots of money for weaponry. And there was discretionary spending. White owned a lot of rugs. I liked Japanese print art. Anyway, luckily it is very easy to live very well without working a day in your life in the modern world.

How? Stocks. White owned lots of stock. She had since she died. She also had shares in money markets, mutual funds, and interests in many international banks. You see, if you know what you’re doing, have some practice, don’t have to pay taxes, and an unlimited fucking time frame in which to trade, it is very easy to be very rich for presumably forever. So, White spent money like it was nothing, and gave me enough to keep me on my feet.

So I had an apartment in a fashionable part of town, under a pseudonym. I furnished it myself using online shopping. Also, White had friendly relationships with almost every major arms dealer in the western world, and a few in the east, so I was well stocked for weaponry. My favorite was a katana dating back to the Meiji restoration.

White taught me to fight mainly out of boredom; we didn’t have to work very hard to kill normal people, so it was mainly because she wanted someone at least around her own abilities. Also, White liked just about any excuse to boss other people around and whack them with sticks.

After a couple years training, I was actually better than her. She was quick, but when I was able to catch her (if a fight lasted an entire night in December, I might catch her once, by the way) I could easily put her head through a brick wall, not that it would do more than make her stomach tingle a little bit.

--

We drove to the Old Man’s house the following night. It was in a residential part of the city, more on the outskirts, practically a suburb. Rows of unique yet same, small little townhouses. As I stepped out of the car and put the keys in my pocket, I noticed childish, chalk drawings on the sidewalk.

“What is this, Pleasantville?” I muttered.

“Shush.” Returned White, “this man is your elder, and you won’t embaress me by showing a lack of respect.”

“Yes, momma.” I don’t know why I was so cranky. Maybe it was the after-effect of the demon blood.

White ignored my comments and rapped smartly on the door. No one came.

So we waited.

And waited.

And waited some more.

“Uhm.”

“He’s old. He doesn’t move very fast. Give him a minute.”

Presently, the door opened to reveal the peeking face of a little girl, maybe eight years old or so. She stared up at me dolefully, rubbed her eyes, and yawned. She scared the hell out of me.

White hunched down on her knees, “Hi there, sweetie, remember me? Auntie White? Is Lazurus still sleeping?”

“I’m coming, I’m coming!” came the gravelly voice of the old man I assumed to be the ‘Old Man’ White had mentioned. The little girl disappeared and the door closed, and we heard the old man laugh.

The door opened again soon enough, revealing an old, withered Arabic man in striped pajamas and a nightcap. He smiled widely at us and threw the door open.

“Mary!” He cried, and it took me a minute, after he had hugged White tightly, to realize that he meant White. White looked just as surprised as me to hear her first name. I guess she hadn’t been called by it in a while.

“And who is this fine young gentleman?” He asked after having let White go, turning to me and extending his hand to me for a handshake.

I took it, and the man’s strong grip belied his ancient appearance, “Mr. Black, sir. We’re sorry to disturb you so late in the evening.”

“Yes, yes, I know your circumstances, young man. It’s no trouble. Come in, come in. I’ll fix us some coffee, my, my, Mary, you’re even more pretty than when I saw you last!” White blushed deeply as the old man said the last part. I had never seen White blush before, and never saw her do it again.

They talked for hours, mostly about old friends, comrades, battles and times long since past. I didn’t understand most of it, and quickly lost interest. The creepy little girl occasionally peeked in, and I tried to smile at her, but all she did was stare.

--