Love Is a Beehive

 

Chris Tannhauser

 


He could forgive her love for truck stop buffets and the fact that her admirable physical fitness seemed to stem from nothing more than moonlight strolls and the digging of “therapy” holes, but the unsent text message on her phone dropped his heart into his gut.  It was just a string of numbers, really, with an area code somewhere in Central Asia.  His hands shook and his vision blurred.  The shame he felt for daring to snoop was brutally knocked from his mind.  Who is he? he thought, staring at her phone in a world gone suddenly sunless.
 

•••

The day he met Mysti (spelled y before i, like a stripper) was hazy at best—he remembered a little bit about a weird-looking kid in an alley asking him, “Hey mister, can you help me find my mom?” and then he was waking up in her basement naked, duct-taped to a folding chair under a single bare bulb.  The kid was there, fidgeting with a pack of cigarettes.  Mysti had that wide-stance thing that meant she was about to let you know what was what, dressed in her goin’-out overcoat, painted-on jeans, and walkin’ boots, dark hair down and wild with a shovel over one shoulder.  Mitch (spelled the regular way, like a guy who never missed Pokémon night) was confused as there wasn’t anywhere to even dig a hole down here, what with the floor being concrete and everything.  His chest hurt, and when he looked down he saw a mess of little foot-shaped bruises like he had been trampled by a kindergarten class.
 
Mysti showed teeth beneath dead eyes.  “Tell me about the time you hit your girlfriend,” she said.
 
Mitch groped through a brain like spilled soup.  “I don’t—I don’t have a girlfriend.”
 
“Oh, Jesus Christ,” said the weird kid.
 
“Tell me about the time you struck a woman.”  Mysti flipped the shovel off her shoulder and plonked it point down, leaning forward on it, her eyes as black as her knuckles where white.  
 
Mitch felt as if his flesh were transparent, his bones little more than whispers, his soul flayed wide and glistening beneath her glare.  “I didn’t—I don’t—” and his mind congealed enough to realize he was in real mortal danger here as the cage in the corner didn’t look very lived in at all, like it was more of a temporary thing, and no one who was ever locked up in it was locked up for long, at least not long enough to leave a mark or even try to worry at it.  His mouth kind of went loose then and he entered a flow state he’d never experienced before or since where he tried to explain how everything he knew about relationships came from SPERMAGEDDON X and the X was a number, not a content qualifier, as the previous nine spermageddons were apparently insufficient, and because he was that guy he’d never actually had a girlfriend, just a series of random fucks with women who weren’t looking for boyfriends at all but didn’t want to be alone for 25 minutes and 51 seconds, and yeah, some of them liked to be choked, and okay, some of them like to get hit but not hit like that, like it was about evoking a sensation in soft tissue, just a wake-up sting, like a pinched nipple, but not to really hurt anyone or leave a mark that wasn’t gone the next day and everyone seemed to go away happy or at least not disappointed because the only thing more important than a condom was consent.
 
Mysti and the weird kid looked at each other.  The kid shrugged and tapped a cigarette out of the pack.  Mysti burst out laughing.  The sound actually made Mitch feel a little better because it was clear she thought something was really funny.
 
“Put him in the cage,” she said when she caught her breath.
 
The kid pulled a face.  “But—”
 
“You heard me.”
 
“Goddammit,” said the kid around his unlit cigarette.  He struggled to knock Mitch over and then struggled and grunted as he scrape-dragged Mitch and the folding chair across the concrete floor in fits and starts and Mitch did his best to help, kind of inchworming his way over the lip of the cage by hinging the chair where he could until he was in and the door was clanged shut and padlocked.
 
“I like this one,” Mysti grinned.
 

•••

 
 
The day she met Mitch was like any other; it certainly didn’t feel like the life-defining inflection point it turned out to be.  He was just supposed to be the next pulse in a steady beat of serial killings, bludgeoned to death with a shovel in an alley, not her person, not the man who gave her everything she dared the world to relinquish.  She was the one who held hearts in her hand, not the other way around.
 
If she were the sundress tradwife-type who put up stupid signs in her house, hers would say LIFE IS A BALL PIT FULL OF HOLOCAUST SHOES.  She preferred knotty, complex things with blood-soaked history, like her metallic blue 1961 Lincoln Continental four-door convertible, or that absolutely ludicrous chopper she got off an enormous biker-cum-meth-mogul named Bear that had lots of welded chain, chipped chrome, and a goddamn fenderless truck tire for a rear wheel—if your ass came off the seat it was going straight onto the tread at speed—it had a V-twin with a blower, all exposed belts and pulleys under the scoop, hungry for ankles.  It sounded like an avalanche of Panzers with some ’67 Huey hog harmonics thrown in for good measure, as subtle as an airborne blitzkrieg.
 
“Looks like a lot of bike for a little lady,” shouted every random douche she bumped into while straddling the throbbing beast.
 
“Ooh, is it ever,” she would reply.  “Maybe you should come back to my place and help me with it?”  ...aaand dead.
 
This was the trick.  Every ambush predator has to come out of a hole—a physical, societal, metaphorical, or conceptual blind spot.  At truck stops she adjusted her gait as she strode across the nightslick parking lot, shortening her steps, catching a toe, stooping like she had 10 miles of bad road on her back, becoming the lot lizard, hiding inside things that look like victims.  She slid into a cab with practiced resignation and said “Get it out for me,” so his hands were in his lap when hers were on the knife and three quick pops to the neck and then pushing that look of deep confusion away to keep the blood on the dash.  
 
But sanity requires hobbies, and to keep things straight she dreamed up bigger and bigger kills, like that one time she took a contract and ended up with 13 dead, none of them the actual target—she got wind that they considered her less a professional and more a loose end, so she doubled back and cleaned up on her own.  Lost a tooth and limped for a week, but it was worth it to teach fistfuls of lessons, learned and then lost at the ends of crowbars and revolvers.
 
But the pearl in the oyster, the lustrous thing she thought she loved more than anything in the world until she met Mitch, was nuclear fucking Armageddon.  It started with an honest-to-god Soviet ICBM launch key she wore around her neck, the weight of it between her breasts a pendulous reminder of the great mass of fear and hate and greed with an oily sheen of patriotism that lay buried and waiting.  She collected documents, photographs, patches, chipboard and plastic fallout calculator wheels, and at the center of her collection, at the very heart of her before she met Mitch, the nuclear launch codes for a lone SS-9 Scarp intercontinental ballistic missile in Turkmenistan.  It took a fractal chain of time, effort, kids and crypto to secure it, but it was more than worth it.  Just looking at the numbers gave her the focused predatory rush of following a would-be john into the men’s room for ritual strangulation—only magnified 8.3 billion times.
 
All she had to do was send that signal, a pebble flicked atop a mountain-peak snow shelf, to deform the authenticating layer and pierce the insufficient fail-safes, flipping zeros to ones and offs to ons from machine to brain to hand to a mechanical twist that jolts 45,000 pounds of chemical propellent into a self-perpetuating cascading reaction that lifts the missile into the sky on a pillar of flame over the desolate Karakum Desert; within a minute it’s at 100,000 feet and igniting the second stage to push for orbit; in another minute it’s at 300,000 feet and the third stage lights to kick the orbital bus over the long, dark-blue arc of the horizon; and a minute after that it’s flying silent above the North Pole, little more than a city-killing bullet at this point, before Earth calls to its wayward child with the voice of gravity and the bus kicks out the warhead and a swarm of penetration aids, aluminum chaff and decoy warheads, and after falling into the thickening atmosphere and surviving maximum aerodynamic heating while decelerating to a stately Mach 20 with the sketchy outlines of the terminal city in view, the warhead arms itself—
 
—and she comes.
 
She had no intention of actually using the digits—that would be insane.  Civilization was the grass to her tiger, and she wasn’t about to burn her hiding place.
 

•••

 
 
Dhruv was jonesing for a cig and vaguely embarrassed to be dressed as a kid again, but it was either that or Mysti would do her thing to him instead.  It was a long fall from self-styled dapper criminal mastermind to serial killer’s assistant, and he had hit his head on every goddamn rung on the way down.  By his second job they had him crawling through HVAC ducts, and it never really got any better.  The end came when he tripped an alarm while wedged in a transom and the guys scattered, leaving him hanging for the cops to take pictures and laugh a good long time before they bothered to get him down.  He went to prison for a short stint that went bad pretty much from the get-go.  Everything you can imagine happening to a little person in prison happened to him, only doubly so because he had a mouth on him.
 
None of this made any sense.  He held no fewer than three Guinness Book World Records for chrissakes, and if you’ve ever looked into those you know it’s no mean feat—things that you can imagine killing someone in three days stand for a week; amounts that are surely illegal are exceeded ten times over.  His records were for Glass Chewed in a Single Sitting (14 kilos), Sustained Blows from a Supermarket Checkout Divider (10,481), and Breath-holding Under Duress (5 minutes, 17 seconds).  He was practically a comic book superhero.
 
Dhruv gave a smokeless sigh and picked a likely-looking simp out of the sidewalk flow just beyond the mouth of the alley, someone who wouldn’t put up too much of a fight—she might like it rough, but that shit scared the piss out of him.  “Hey mister, can you help me find my mom?”
 
The simp turned his head even as the rest of the crowd didn’t.  The hook thus set, Dhruv faded into the alley.
 
“Hey—hey little guy,” said the simp.  “What seems to be the trouble?”
 
Dhruv made a face.  “I think my mom’s back here somewhere.”  He walked back around the dumpster like Mysti told him to.
 
The simp followed, and Mysti stepped out, grinning, a shiny, stickered shovel over her shoulder.
 
“Oh!” said the simp, startled.  “Are you his mother?”
 
“Nope,” she said, “I’m the bad bitch who’s gonna kill you with a shovel.”
 
“Uh,” said the simp, and fainted dead away.
 
Dhruv and Mysti stared at him for a moment.
 
“Slap him awake,” she said.
 
Dhruv put his little hands on the simp’s neck.  “He doesn’t have a pulse!”
 
“Well, do CPR or something.”
 
Dhruv spread his arms.  “Have you seen me?  I can’t!  I’m too small!”
 
“Then get on his chest and dance, little man!”
 
“Wha—what dance should I do?”
 
“What?”
 
“I mean, which dance is best for CPR?”
 
“Maybe something shovel related?” she growled.
 
Dhruv landed on the simp’s chest with both feet and started doing the first thing that came out of his body, a reflex, really, from middle school: The Running Man—arms out and back, stomp and slide, stomp and slide, just like Vanilla Ice ripping off MC Hammer.
 
Unbeknownst to both of them, the simp was currently having a vision of a disappointingly genderless angel.  YOU HAVE TO GO BACK, it said in a voice like an avalanche, THERE IS SOMETHING TERRIBLY IMPORTANT JESUS NEEDS YOU TO DO.
 
The simp woke up crying and you know the rest; as for Dhruv, this is the last we’ll ever see of him—so we just have to hope something really good happened to him, like winning the lottery, and drowning in a bubble bath with like three supermodels, high as a fucking kite.
 

•••

 
 
Like many predators who revel in the joy of the hunt, Mysti liked to play with her food.  She was nude, sitting on the edge of the bed, legs spread.  Mitch stood before her likewise naked, erection throbbing with noose-terror and whatever she had shot him up with.
 
“I don’t get it,” he said finally.
 
“Well,” she said, “you better think hard and figure it out.”
 
“Does my life depend on it?”
 
She laughed.  “Oh yeah.”
 
“What do you want?” he asked.
 
“I want whatever you think you can get away with.”
 
He glanced at the bedroom door.
 
“You’ll be three-steps dead before you get close.”
 
“I’m dead anyway.”
 
“Like a true samurai, honey.  This is your lady or the tiger moment.  Either you figure this out and die like a man, or you don’t and you get the shovel.”
 
There was a quiet, electric moment and something happened in him, something from the angel maybe, or whatever was in the hypodermic—he saw CEOs in handcuffs, the pyramid on the dollar screwed upside down, the gradient of mollusks from hard to soft and the timidity fled him like a ballon kissing open flame—he grabbed her wrist, yanked her sideways and flipped her over, put his knees between her thighs and clamped a hand onto the back of her neck, pressing her into the mattress—she gasped as he spit on his cock and reached down with the other hand to rub it up and down against her until her folds gave way to liquid heat; as he built to a rhythm that made the bed shudder, he wasn’t just fucking a pussy or even fucking her—he was fucking the world, not giving, not taking, just pure animal dominance.  She arched her back into the pounding and when she came it was harder than anything she could ever do for herself.
 

•••

 
 
Love is a beehive, a myriad of little things, turning, dancing, pressing and sliding against each other, and somehow, after a revelry of this, the honey comes out.  The way she took a drinking straw with her teeth first, then enclosed it with her lips; the absent-minded finger-pass to tuck her hair behind an ear; the zig-zag crease between her brows when she was concentrating.  Sure, there was the mind-blowing head she gave him in the back seat of her Lincoln Continental, but 25 minutes and 51 seconds later you’re back to the other 23-and-a-half hours of the day, and you damn well better find something just as good to squeeze between the rest of the ticks and tocks.  And so they did.
 

•••

 
 
Who is he? he asked the universe again, looking at the unsent message on her phone.  He took a deep breath that caught at the end—and pressed send, awaiting what he hoped wouldn’t be a world-shattering reply from her secret lover.

NIGHTFEAST

Chris Tannhauser

You would not be wrong if you thought you saw Primrose and Pansy—world-famous conjoined twins, the celebrated “two-headed girl”—exiting the mass shooting event at The Vampire’s Kiss lounge in Manhattan with a back-slung combat shotgun and depleted bandoliers. Prim’s face was streaked with gore and a thousand-yard grimace, while Pansy sported a black head bag, cinched around her neck, for some reason. It’s true Prim yelled at a dumpy-looking guy with greasy hair and glasses, “Let’s get the fuck out of here!” as she clambered up the side of a Cold War-era tracked APC and down the hatch, then tore off into the inky coils of a city-at-night illustration.

You did see these things, because while Pansy may have been a kindergarten teacher, Prim was a goddamn vampire hunter.

A couple things about the twins: Your mirror image bobs along with you everywhere you go on an ethereal tether—it’s ever-present, peeking like a conjured ghost from windows, car fenders, still pools of water. But imagine your mirror image embodied, imbued with voice, a permanent presence regardless of where you happen to glance. This was all they ever knew, and what they couldn’t quite explain. Make all the jokes you want about V-neck sweaters—they don’t care—they had two legs, two arms, two heads, but only one heart. The sister not a copy or an echo but a broader sense of self, a limelit stage and theater instead of being stuck in the one-bulb dressing room.

Now, the great thing about vampires is that you already know everything about them: how they drink jet fuel for kicks, how they fly with rainbows coming out of their butts, and how they give off a constant tuning-fork whine.

Of course, the vampires of fiction are debonair aristocrats possessed of the refinement of æons—the beautiful dead sheened in a glaze of taste, style, and world-weary insouciance... but in reality, they’re all misfits, either by the circumstances of their second birth or by the interminable caress of clock hands. After all, what’s fashionable in Hell is confusing in the dim embers of our world, and eating like a serial killer inevitably devolves into dressing like one.

As for vampire hunters, there were two kinds: wizards (who all smelled of cat piss and Hot Pockets), and techs. Prim was a stone-cold tech—instead of focusing her will into a singularity to warp reality or some shit, she put her trust in large amounts of kinetic energy delivered abruptly and liberally.

Prim had started out with a wizard sidekick, Marty, mainly because he had a car, a lime-green ‘75 Gremlin with a blown 304 and torn-out back seat. At that time, he was working on a special project—“The Martymobile”—a surplus Soviet BTR-50 Amphibious Armored Personnel Carrier, a growling, diesel-belching monstrosity painted with enough teenage skateboard iconography to strike fear into long-dead hearts.

As a wizard, Marty left a lot to be desired. He was known mostly for what he called his “magic murder rock”, which he swore had been ensorcelled at great peril to his immortal soul. He shouted impressive-sounding spell names as he swung it to crack heads and knock bloody teeth into the carpet. But in all the time Prim had worked with him, he never once made anything disappear, not even his virginity.

Prim felt bad, but what happened to Marty was his own goddamn fault. There were no numbered rules in the vampire hunting game—in fact, it was something of an in-group pastime to shout things like, “Rule number seventeen, no smoking in bed!” as you dropped a coffin lid on a startled vampire and a pinless grenade—but it turned out the last one, Rule Omega, was “Never let a vampire drink jet fuel.”

It was a standard raid, some Count Orlok wanna-be—Magnus Swankpot—loading his party jet with pretty little things for a picnic in international airspace—but they crashed the party early, caught him in his hangar, killed his crew and sent the girls packing. After the bright-lit, wide-open space was done echoing with gunfire and screams, they had him cuffed and tied to a heavy wooden chair, like a leftover prop from a Hammer film. The cops would be here tout de suite, and they needed to get this over with. Standard procedure meant digging a narrow hole, dumping the vampire in head first, dousing it with an accelerant, and letting Mother Earth absorb the threats and curses until it was done.

Here, they were going to have to Quảng Đức him, and hope he would pyre himself out before the restraints burned through. But Marty had another idea: Why not funnel him like they do in dirtbag crime movies? So Marty took his magic murder rock to Magnus’ protesting mouth, jammed a funnel down his throat, and poured military-grade jet fuel straight into his gullet. And that’s the moment the Good Old Days officially ended.

The jet fuel made Magnus go nuts with psychotic strength, snapping the cuffs and standing up out of the chair in a cloud of splinters and rope—then he farted a rainbow and careened off the high ceiling, which would have been hilarious except for the torn bodies he left in his wake. Prim and Pansy were the only ones who made it out alive that night, looking back over their shoulders once from the darkened tarmac to see Marty snatched sideways out of frame by a Lucky Charms commercial.

Word spread, and pretty soon all the vampires were mainlining jet fuel, leaping into the sky with an ejaculatory grunt, bodies flexed in an orgasmic posture, rainbows streaming from their gaping anuses. And the sound, the sound was like glitter, like dollar bills dusting glitter off a stripper’s tits.

††

The head-bagging started after Pansy got PTSD from all the vampire stuff: stepping into the splash zone of a breaching charge, watching terrified undead juggle a live grenade, then the things bullets do, and close-in knife work with snapping fangs and grave-breath in the face—if she was going to be along for the ride, she put her foot down, it was going to be with earplugs and a head bag, because no one wanted to see that shit. It wasn’t long after that she demanded the bag whenever Tingleboy came over.

Pansy didn’t date, but Prim had Tingleboy, something like a boyfriend, a tattooed carcinogen she indulged in whenever she won the Saturday night coin-flip to see who got the pussy. Tails meant giving it up to Tingleboy doggy style—‘cuz he knew how to wreck it just right—as Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir” ground the air into a mindless paste; heads meant pampering it like a fancy pet, elaborately trimmed, powdered, gently fed from the palm of the hand on pink satin pillows with something whiny and tinkly plinking in the background, the slow-build orgasm jolting Prim awake.

But when she was with Tingleboy, the thing that got her there every single time was the forbidden thought that he was riding her as just one woman, her sister made tiny and far, nothing but a quiet whimper under a shivering pillow.

The same whimper she made, distantly, when Magnus got his hands on them.

Prim figured they were dead when it all caught up with them—the jokes, the violence, the violation from every quarter—but Magnus was glad for what her kind had given to his, and wanted to magnanimously reward her with what he called “freedom”.

“If you turn us,” screamed Prim, “we will rise and destroy you! We would rather die than have your ‘freedom’!”

“Oh, child,” cooed Magnus, “I’m not turning you. I’m setting you free.”

The worst part, the very worst part, was that even as Pansy began to realize what was happening, as the hands closed around her pulsing throat, even as Prim felt the vicarious body-panic and the absolute soul-tearing horror of feeling her sister, who was her very self, tumble away down a shaft of dwindling panic, there was, somewhere deep in the dark, the tiniest spark of relief.

††

Prim quit the business and threw herself into Tingleboy’s briar patch—it was everything you can imagine, and many things you can’t—for the only place their worlds overlapped was in their pants. She was his better in every way and he was no longer a strong enough opiate. The end came when she woke one night to Tingleboy nudging Pansy’s slack mouth with the head of his cock.

After the blackout, Prim knew Tingleboy was gone, but what she didn’t know was that no one would ever really find his body, that the Hefty bag of biosludge would take the coroner a good month to even ID as human—all that, just a black hole, like that one time she woke up with bangs.

But this time, this time she woke with an unslaked murder-thirst.

††

It was in the deep blue predawn anti-gloaming that Prim breached Magnus’ Art Deco sanctum with the Martymobile, treads making a hash of the precise granite stairs and getting air through the church-glass doors—as it ronched down into the parquetry she cranked the steering levers in opposite directions and floored it again, doing mad donuts and throwing up a polished walnut rooster tail in every direction. The 14-tonne wad of steel, fire, and hate slewed through the interior walls, knocking all the fancy finery to splinters and peeling tapestries and curtains off the walls and into the treads.

Prim locked the brakes and skidded sideways through the marble edifice of a flamboyantly gargoyled fireplace built somewhere far away at great expense, then dismantled, shipped, and remanteled here at great expense, and now demolished into raining chunks for the cost of a gallon of diesel. She gave the vampires a six-count to gather their wits, hiss dramatically, and burst down the stairs in a furball of anthill rage... On “six” she popped smoke, only she had swapped out the benign signal grenades for white phosphorus rounds, blanketing the room in searing phosphorus pentoxide and peppering the howling undead with nuggets of pure hellfire. She gave another six-count to allow the stragglers to make it to the party, then she triggered the reactive armor, blasting the flesh from their bones.

She popped the hatch and stood, her face obscured by a gas mask, Pansy’s head next to hers, encased in an honest-to-God saint’s reliquary from the Vatican, all gilt and bullet-proof glass, the head of John the Baptist having been shaken out of the getaway car’s window like a half-finished Happy Meal. The box was lit from within, illuminating Pansy’s half-lidded eyes over cheeks flush with murder blood. Prim took the pintle-mounted 12.7 mm DShk heavy machine gun in both fists and ran an entire belt out into the second floor from underneath.

She grapnel gunned up to the third floor, rising out of the white smoke on a thrumming cable and onto her feet in full battle rattle—grenades, pistols, shotgun, rifle, and a whisper-thin ceramic shard that was a knife the same way people are apes. Her carbon-fiber Make-A-Wish exoskeleton whined to life.

This was the party floor. The first two were people floors, meant for guests and plausible deniability, outfitted to look like movie sets. But up here, on the third floor, this is where the undead cut loose, raving with humans, bringing life to the party as it were, but they did forget to feed and water the ones they didn’t drain, as dead as forgotten pets, flopped over one another like Burning Man kaleidoscoped with the Holocaust.

Prim unslung her combat shotgun and reached back to key the emitter in her purple Dora the Explorer backpack—a blazing hologram of Christ being whipped rose above her twin heads, a nod to the idea that vampires should cower before such imagery, though it seemed to cause more confusion than discomfort.

But sometimes a moment of confusion is all you need. They converged on Prim from all directions, from every stinking hole, and every time a vampire looked up and winced, she blew a mess through their chest or knocked their head off with a shotgun blast. Here, she witnessed the full flower of vampire culture in all its endless forms: the hooker whose coffin was probably a dumpster; the pregnant one whose undead fetus will never be born, forcing her to eat for two for all eternity; the dude in the distressed denim jacket, moon boots, and no pants, with a gaping hamburger badger den where his genitals should be; too-many-hospital-gowns guy; trash-bag-diaper lady; and so on, ad nauseam, etc.

When the shotgun was empty, she dropped it—eschewing the luxury of a reload—and activated the twin 20 mm autocannons on the rooftop next door. Details evaporated into a sideways storm of splinters, chunks, and screams—the manufacturer suggested that you choose something weirdly specific as an IFF indicator, like a purple Dora the Explorer backpack, say—so all the chaos wedged around Prim like sleet off a sideways umbrella.

After the cannons went silent Prim peeled the gas mask—her face flush and sweaty, dark hair sticking to her cheeks—and worked her way up to the fourth floor along the edge of a tattered staircase, hugging the pock-marked wall with her back. She stalked through the mansion, the stragglers actively avoiding her now, allowing her to stoke and build the rage she had nearly spent below.

She knew she was getting close when she ran into the surgical centaur with a gimp mask and ball gag.

“Well,” she actually said aloud, “that’s different.”

The thing snorted, its great Frankenstein-stitched belly flexing, as it hefted the diagonal-cut axle from a car some tabloid mom drove into a canal to drown her children.

Prim set her exoskeleton to BREAK SHIT and charged even as the beast surged into a gallop and raised the axle over its black-leather-laced head—Prim slid beneath it, tucking herself between the obliterating hooves, coming out the other side behind a wave of gore and looping intestines, crimson-licked knife in her fist. The centaur stamped, gagged on the ball in its mouth, and tried to turn in the tangling morass of its own innards before collapsing and literally coming apart at the seams.

And that was it. Magnus had to be around here somewhere—the oldest vampires, the richest, they always had something shockingly expensive and outrageously stupid as their miniboss, it’s like they couldn’t help themselves. And then they’d be stunned when it didn’t work. The expense! The effort! The sheer brilliance of it! Of course it had to be right—I thought of it myself! But then, true intellect and self-awareness were not exactly vampire traits.

††

Prim found Magnus lounging sideways on a shitty TV-show throne, something someone had told him was cool once, so he drove the owner of the Pasadena storage joint where it was kept into bankruptcy and bought the business at a fire-sale price so his agents could pop the padlock, claim the janky nerd seat, and torch the place for the insurance money.

Magnus was wearing one of Elvis’ Vegas-era bejazzled jumpsuits, a roomy white leather job with a spattering of faux jewels and terrycloth internals that had never been laundered because white leather—it was soaked with the very essence of The King, a potent, sloshing bath of testosterone, uppers, downers, alcohol, and hurled panties.

Marty stood before him in the vast and filthy throne room, monochrome in shadow and blacked windows. His insides dripped from his groin in glistening gray wattles as he read aloud from a crumpled, dirty notebook with faux-Shakespearean gravitas:

“...tarot girls turn cards and say, ‘Things from beyond the stars lick the sweat off your dreams,’ but so it is at every scale, whale-fall in the deep when cetacean corpses drip into that far seabed that comes suddenly alive with chitinous, multi-jointed life, boiling like your mattress when you lay yourself down to sleep only to awaken a nightfeast of mites in their tens of millions, a carnival at the knees of fleas, those lumbering titans—”

Prim’s hand reflexively reached for a grenade.

“Stop,” said Magnus, “both of you.”

Marty turned and didn’t look the least bit surprised.

Prim addressed him. “You know what we promised we’d do if the other turned.”

Marty spread his arms. “I didn’t turn—this is becoming! I’m more me than I’ve ever been, Prim!”

“You were supposed to be better than this,” Prim said, “you were supposed to transcend mere flesh, remember?”

“What do you think I’m doing?” Marty took a step forward, entrail skirt waggling. “I have passed through the night and into that brighter day! The fog is gone! Everything is energy! It’s glorious!”

Magnus sat up and leaned forward, clutching the edge of his seat and tapping his feet. “I knew you’d be back,” he enthused, “I just knew it! And you’ve exceeded all my expectations. I haven’t been this entertained in—” he looked down and furrowed his brow. “Well, in a very long time. But it doesn’t have to end here. Together, we can wipe away the past, build something new and exciting! Something to seize the Earth and make the gods tremble!” His eyes blazed blue in the darkness.

Prim stared.

Marty cleared his throat. “Take the Master’s offer—you’ll live forever.”

“What about Pansy?” Prim said too quickly.

Marty clucked his tongue. “She’s already flown the coop. Took the eggs with her. You wouldn’t like what happens when you… reanimate the dead. We can get her something even cooler than that terrarium you have her in, something—something befitting your love for her?” He trailed off and shrugged. “Or we could just cinch a cord around it till it falls off.”

Prim startled at the word love—a dead thing, a stone in her gut... Pansy was gone. Her light and life, the best part of her, erased from the world like a thumb across a tear. What more could she hope for?

Magnus sat back and steepled his fingers at her hesitation. Marty chuckled softly.

And yet—

Beneath that stone, that magnetic rock of dead love, the atomic spark of life.

This wasn’t a hand reaching down to raise her up, but the desperate grasp of the fallen to drag her down into a long, irretrievable descent—the only thing they ever really had to offer.

Prim responded to that grasping hand in kind, stripping the grenade of its pin and tossing it at Marty in a single motion, a motion that continued to her slung M4 carbine.

Marty caught the grenade reflexively, bobbled it, turned and tripped in the puddle of himself.

Magnus snarled and leaped as the grenade WHAPPED Marty’s corpus into a shower—but the throne Magnus sat upon was not actually iron—it was fiberglass—and his Elvin spangles caught in the elaborate back of it, the whole thing cracking in half instead of throwing him skyward.

Prim shouldered the blunt M4 and flicked the selector from UH OH to OH NO and let an entire magazine of 5.56 NATO fly—as a contortional blur, Magnus dodged most of it, but as rounds began to find a home in his flesh, he became less frenzied, more in focus, finally slouching back into his ruptured throne.

With practiced economy Prim dropped the spent mag and slotted a fresh one, snapped the charging handle back, and filled him like a beehive at sunset.