My Dead Body

Charlie Huston

My Dead Body

The fifth book in the Joe Pitt series, 2005

To Simon Lipskar.

For suggesting that I might avoid a return to bartending

by writing a book in a genre other than crime.

“Fantasy, SF, I don’t know, horror maybe.”

And to Mark Tavani.

For ignoring his entirely rational first reaction.

“Vampires really aren’t my thing.”

ORIGINAL TRANSCRIPTION DO NOT COPY

If you’re listening to this I’m dead.

(laughter)

Could be that’s maybe only fu

I wonder how I did die.

So many goddamn options. The mind fucking boggles. But probably I just got plain shot. Course, seeing as how many times I’ve been shot before, it must have been a well-placed bullet. Or just a lot of them all at once. Then again, I knew a guy in my line who got machine-gu

(laughter)

Lived to tell about it. That’s fu

I was put in on the joke when I was sixteen. Happened in a bathroom at CBGB during a Ramones gig in ′77. What it was, a guy was paying me twenty bucks to hand-job him, and while I was doing it he chewed a hole in my neck and started slurping.

(laughter)

Okay, maybe you had to be there.

That guy, if I could have ever got my hands on that guy. I got my hands on plenty of other people I had a problem with. But I’m not the type to keep score.

(laughter)

Trust me, the jokes don’t get any better the rest of the way.

What I notice about getting older, things that seemed fu

(laughter)

See what I mean.

Tell the truth, this is the most I’ve laughed in forever. Not literally forever, I’m not that old. But, yeah, something about this is hitting the fu

Probably it’s the idea of you, whoever you are, listening to this. For you, this is one of two things. Either it’s the lamest prank ever, or it’s too little too late. If you’re listening to this, either everything has blown up and everyone knows everything, or it hasn’t. Either way, I’m go

So.

So, hey, here’s some trivia for you. Did you know a pregnant woman has about forty percent greater blood volume than a woman who’s not pregnant? Take a woman, she’s a hundred and ten pounds. Her blood volume is about seven percent of that. Seven point seven pints. Or thereabouts. Call it eight pints. Over her first two trimesters she’s go

More than a fat man.

That much blood, you can stretch that two or three months. One body in the ground and you’re above it for another sixty to ninety days.

Well, two bodies in the ground.

What’s that worth, that extra forty percent, over a regular person and their seven to ten pints, what’s that extra worth?

The blood of a pregnant woman and her baby, what’s the price on that?

(laughter)

I’m not laughing ‘cause I think it’s fu

Just tell it like it happened. That’s what she said. Like talking is a gift I have or something. Well, better talking than writing. You had to make sense of this by reading my chicken scratch you’d be crying not laughing.

So.

And that wasn’t a rhetorical question by the way. I know the price. The blood of a pregnant woman goes for about twenty grand. That’s the price in dollars anyway.

There’s all kinds of prices you can pay for such a thing. Parts of yourself that will never grow back.

But that’s the story. And I’m supposed to tell it. Like it happened.

So okay.

So I’m a Vampyre. Spelled with a Y instead of an I. Capitalized like it’s a name. Don’t ask me, just tradition I guess. Anyway. Vampyre with a Y, that’s the real deal. With an I, that’s for scaring babies.

I’m the kind that scares everyone.

And when this started, I was a secret. Lived in an apartment, just like you. Well, just like you if you kept a mini-fridge of blood. When it ended, I was living in a sewer. Downward mobility being a danger to my kind.

Should be a punch line for something: Vampyre in a sewer.

But it’s not.

It’s my life.

(laughter)

Still, it makes me laugh.

So.

This is what happened.

I can feel it, that little extra bit of heat. And smell staleness in the air. Heat and carbon dioxide, a combination that equals life. Something breathing and exhaling, the air filling its lungs, the oxygen being absorbed. Something warm and breathing, you can count on at least one thing about it. It’s full of blood.

Ahead of me in the dark, something alive.

Alive for now anyway.

I didn’t expect him to be so much trouble to find. When he ran down Freedom Tu

Then he went shit-diving.

I don’t know if it was a plan he had, the way he went spastic and cut up the cripple makes me think pla

Went from tracking a guy who smelled like an abattoir to a guy who smelled like a porto-potty. Which pretty much describes the way everything under Manhattan smells.

Got dicey after that. Cagey little fucker realized I wasn’t right on his ass, he started to calm down a bit, caught his breath some, stopped panting so much, stopped stumbling so much, started picking spots he could hole up a minute at a time and be quiet. If there’d been any kind of light at all I’d just have started throwing rocks at him until he went down. All I needed was one of those odd reflections you get down here sometimes. Sunlight filters through the grates over the train tu

Instead I’m blind. Whether that means it’s night up top I couldn’t say. Been some time since I’ve kept track of the hour. Used to be I knew sunup and sundown like my own heartbeat. But after you miss a couple hundred of each you start to lose that sense.