The Immortal

[The Immortal is a story about a multicultural conflux of supernatural beliefs and persons; the centerpierce of this story is the society built by those whose life is potentially immortal—at a price.]

one

            BEING A VAMPIRE is a lot different than I would have thought.  The stories and legends could not have possibly prepared me for the existence I live now.  As far as moving around in the dark and subsisting on blood goes, that much is real.  As for the rest, well, you'll just have to listen to the rest of the story.  I can only fill in so much, though.  But the others know.  Between us all, it will all come out eventually.

            That particular night, I was riding out of downtown, just north, to a trendy new area of town, known as the High Falls District.  Most of it directly overlooked the Genesee River and the best parts of it got to look right out at the Genesee Falls.  I guess they even had laser light shows on Saturday nights.  I'd lived there for twenty-five years—my entire life—and I had never even seen it.  Looking at it that way, it seemed kind of silly.  Now?  Well, let’s just say I’m not in any big rush to do anything.  Anyway, trendy restaurants, bars, clubs, computer firms, internet startups: that's the kind of stuff that was down there.  Newer, faster, bigger, and better looking.  The best way to term it was posh.  It was all nice, real nice; upscale without being too upper class.  Whatever.  You get the point.

            You see, while that part of the city was the up and coming spot to be, it wasn't always that way.  Being right on the river, it used to be all manufacturing, mostly the kind of businesses that would rely upon waterpower: flour mills and stuff like that.  As it happened, a lot of them went out of business in the last century or so.  So for a long time, the area was just a wasteland of prime real estate.  Now?  Most of that old stuff is gone, but there are a few of the old buildings left, some inhabited, some not.  Regardless, those that aren't a part of the new High Falls District, are a part of the old.  The new has been refurbished completely, inside and out; the buildings that were once worn away, the paint and brick cracking, peeling, and chipped, empty smokestacks rotting with toxic dust, had long since been repainted and repaired.  Most people looked at any of the old buildings as eyesores, bringing down the property value for the rest of the area.  Yet not all people wanted to fix up their property, let alone sell it.  God knows why; I don't know what anyone could be using an abandoned building for.  I may not have been a student of economics, but it seemed kind of ridiculous to me.

            That's where we came in.  I had been spacing out, just gazing out the side window of Duvalier's 1976 black Ford.  I couldn’t even tell you what model car it was.  My father always complained about the impossibility of recognizing modern cars that are the same from year to year: factory repeats, unlike the cars of old.  I don’t know, maybe he would have known this one.  I couldn’t tell you.  I was the opposite.  I didn’t know anything about cars and certainly didn’t know the model name of a car produced shortly after my birth.  All I knew about this car was that it was dark, thick, and obtuse: a perfect match for Duvalier.  As for the man, I wasn’t sure if that was his last name, his first name, or just his name.  It was the only one I'd ever heard anyone use for him and I wasn’t sure I wanted to be the one to ask him about it.

            We were almost to the High Falls.  Remember how I said that not everyone wanted to sell to the new prospectors of this downtown gold rush?  Well, Julien had a problem with one in particular.  Who’s Julien?  Julien was the leader of us vampires—excuse me—Immortals, as he would say.  Regardless, for whatever reason, Julien had decided that in the far corner of the High Falls District an apartment building would sell well; it would have a great view, tall enough to look over the river and the falls itself, over all of the glittering High Falls District, as well as being able to look south towards downtown.  All in all, a great idea.  The only problem was, there was one piece of land that he needed to build it that he didn't own.  Like I said, that's where we came in.

            Being a vampire was definitely different than I thought.  Sometimes it felt more like a Mafia family than a consortium of undead monsters.  Then again, I didn't know if we really were undead or not, or for that matter, if we were really monsters.  We were a lot different than you might have thought.

            At least, that’s what I thought when I wasn’t with Duvalier.  He was a different breed altogether.  I felt the same as I always did when I turned to look at him again.  You could always just sense something wrong.  A lot of us, especially the younger ones, or ones who fed less often, didn't resonate the way he did.  He was the kind of guy that walked down the middle of a crowded sidewalk and everyone stood three feet back without knowing why.  He was the guy who said something and everyone was afraid to contradict him.  Duvalier had a dark skin that wasn't so much as black or red or white as it was all of them.  I've been told that he had a mixed racial heritage; maybe it was because of that that his features were fascinating to look at (if you dared): his face seemed to be a perfect mold of skin that fit tight over his high cheekbones and hard jaw.  His black hair was short and coarse and long; thick sideburns flowed past his ears and started to curve around his jaw, just stopping there, only to bracket a short growth of hair on his chin.  Hairy as he was, he had thinner eyebrows than you would expect, but they had a sharpness to them.  All of the black hair on his head and that on his face, anchored by black, enveloping eyes, lent perpetual shadows to his visage, giving a haunt to what in every other respect was a normal, if not attractive, appearance.  Yet even though by clinical standards, I or anyone else might respect his appearance as handsome, no one would say that Duvalier was handsome.  It wasn’t that he wasn't good looking, it was just somehow that his intensity and ruthless aura demanded an opinion that was completely asexual.

            Duvalier turned to meet my gaze and immediately I snapped my head away.  Resting my head on my hand, the elbow of which was leaning on the doorframe, I looked straight ahead.  Maybe he wouldn't say anything.

            "We're almost there," he said in his raspy voice.

            "Right," I muttered.  Even Duvalier's voice was intimidating.  It had the characteristic of sounding like rumbling thunder, yet one that made you cringe like long nails over a chalkboard.

            "We're going to start at the top," he said. "That way by the time we come down and finish, it'll all go up that much quicker."

            Classic Duvalier.  If anyone else was asked to burn out a building to try and force its owners to sell, they'd just douse the bottom floor, light it, and let the building burn itself out.  Not Duvalier.  He wanted to be sure.  He wanted to know for a fact before he lifted a finger that the entire building would be up and done with before the fire department even got a call.  Of course, they were maybe only a ten-minute drive from here in normal traffic, right on Lake Road.  Okay, Duvalier, I’ll give you that one; maybe there was a logic to your psychoticness.  I shot another quick look at him.  God, I was glad none of us were telepathic.

            The car stopped.  I got out and headed for the trunk.  He had already popped it open, so I grabbed four gas tanks, two at a time, and set them on the ground.  For his part, Duvalier was looking around, making sure that no one was spying us or what we were about to do.  For all the griping I did about Duvalier, he was sort of like your dad.  No matter how much you complained about the lengths to which he went, and how he always insisted on doing things his way, he usually had a reason for it; and more often than not, he was right.

            Duvalier pulled his black leather jacket over his shoulders; it had loosened during the drive.  His jaw tightened—it's the best way I can put it—he tended to do this thing, where his eyes narrowed, his teeth gritted, and his cheeks sucked in ever so slightly, and it didn't mean anything other than he was ready for whatever it was that he had to do.  His jaw tightened and he looked down at me—and I do mean down.  He was only a few inches over six feet (and I was only a few under), but he was at least two hundred and a quarter pounds.  He was thick and muscular, and maybe it was his aura, his resonance that I was talking about before, but he had a way of making you feel as if you were a foot shorter and a hundred pounds lighter than you really were.  Now imagine what someone like that would be like in a fight—especially with vampiric strength and speed.  Most of us Immortals were picked for a certain reason, an ability to contribute to the quasi-culture Julien had built as a microcosm of the "real" world: Duvalier's was to fight.

            Looking down at me, he pulled one black glove out of each of his front two pockets in his black leather pants.  "Do you have your gloves?" he said.

            "Yeah," I replied, pulling them out of my own black jeans.  I nodded.  I didn't have a dark jacket like Duvalier, but I was wearing a black turtleneck.  After all, despite being three in the morning, it was May.  I was warm enough.  Besides, whatever I lacked in actual body temperature, I made up for in adrenaline.  Like I said, being a vampire wasn't quite what I had expected.  And despite the excitement of the last few weeks, this wasn't something I did often, and I was a bit nervous.  Especially with so many external threats to Julien's set-to.

            "You awake?" Duvalier barked, picking up two of the gas tanks.

            "Yeah," I said, shutting the trunk as quietly as I could.

            "Good.  You can sleep later.  We got work to do."

            I nodded the affirmative, picking up the other two gas tanks.  I followed his dark form, which was lumbering up ahead of me, looking this way and that.  I  kept my head down, looking up just enough to see him before me.  Another thing I noticed about him was that he was silent when he moved.  I mean, I tried to be quiet, but even now, in the middle of the night, there were noises, sounds, things to cover you.  Yet there were times when I kicked something or my shoes just slapped the ground wrong.  Not him.  I seriously turned all attention away from the mission, just trying to hear something from him: a breath, a grunt, a misstep, the swish of his jacket or pants for Christ's sake.  Nothing.  Damn.  I had to get him to teach me that trick someday.  I had seen a few of the others using weird and different aptitudes, stuff that I didn't even know we could do, but I sure hadn't learned any yet, even though Colin tried to show me a few the other day.  I would have wagered that Duvalier knew just about all there was to know.

            Duvalier stopped right at the double doors and set down his gas tanks.  "Are you going to pick the lock?" I asked.

He looked over his shoulder with a piercing glare.  "Would you spend time picking a lock on a door you were about to burn down?"

            "I guess not," I muttered.

            "No," he said, turning back towards the doors.

            Pulling his arms up and leaning back, he raised his leg and then extended it, thrusting it forward in a lightning fast snap that sent one of the doors caving in, ripping it off one of its two hinges.  While I'm not sure if a normal human could have done that or not, I somehow doubted that he had exercised a human level of strength in attempting it.

            He picked up his gas tanks and walked in.  I followed him, ducking around the other, loose door.

            "This building has five floors, " he said. "I'll take the fifth and fourth, you take the third and second.  Make sure you save enough to douse exactly one half of the hallway you're looking down right now."

            "Duvalier," I started.

            "What?" he rasped.

            "It's a little dark in here.  I mean, right now, we're standing in the open doorway and there's light from the street lamps, but how are we supposed to see once we're inside?"

            Duvalier's jaw tightened.  "Hasn't Julien taught you anything?"

            "Not much," I admitted.

            "Okay," he said, setting down the gas tanks again.  I did likewise. "You've fed before, right?"

            "Yeah," I nodded.

            "Okay.  Close your eyes.  Eventually this will become second nature, but for now, you need to concentrate.  Close your eyes and try to feel your blood.  Not necessarily all of it, not your human blood—but the blood that is the soul; the blood that is the souls of those you’ve fed on.   Feel that blood.  Feel that strength, that power; feel that soul inside you.  Do not feel your soul, feel the souls that you have fed upon, feel that extra power, that extra strength running through your veins."

            If I had thought about the morality of what he was saying, of what we really were, maybe I would have thought we were monsters, but at the time, I was just listening to a surprisingly patient Duvalier.  And if he was going to teach, I was going to listen.

            I could feel what he was talking about.  It was like when you do a shot of whiskey and you could feel that shot in your bloodstream: something extra, something warm circulating through you.  Maybe it was like what intravenous drug users felt, I didn't know.  But there was something powerful, something alive inside of me—something that made me more than human—and I could feel it.  And Duvalier could feel that I had felt it.

            "Good," he whispered.

            "Now what?" I asked, eyes still closed.

            "Now let it flow to your eyes.  It's not so much that you are making the blood flow to your eyes—you don't want to burst a blood vessel.  But rather that you are feeling your eyes, that you are more conscious of your eyes, of how they feel.  You’re feeling the blood already there," he said.

            "Okay," I breathed.

            "Now picture this room, this hallway.  Imagine what your eyes saw a moment ago, seeing me in the foreground."

            "Okay."

            "In a moment you will open your eyes.  At first it will be dark.  Then superimpose your mental image over that darkness.  At first it will be only your imagination, what you see what will not be real, and will not last.  However, that is when you must tell your eyes that there is light.  Use that little bit of light to brighten the hall.  Soon your vision will adapt to the lesser light."

            Slowly I opened my eyes, trying to keep in my mind's eye what I thought I should be seeing, but all I saw was the dim light of the front entry.  Before me, Duvalier nodded slowly.  I kept focused.  Tensing my shoulders, I felt the blood in my shoulders: rising into my head, flushing my face. That blood suddenly linked to my eyes and they started to tingle, my arms going numb. Limp at my side, my fingers twitched unconsciously.  As if dancing, as if riding the crests of the dust motes that swirled in this dank, abandoned hall, knowing I could see them when the sun was riding through the windows, my vision started to adapt: exploding slowly upon a bright scene, as if it were daytime.  At first the change was frightening, almost threatening, but then I could feel my blood rushing, I could feel the efficacy of what Duvalier had asked me to do.  He smiled menacingly, his teeth baring.

            "Well done," he said.  "Feel a little rush?"

            "Yes," I said.

            "That is the power of the blood,” Duvalier said, still smiling wickedly.  “Now let's go."

            We picked up our gas tanks and went up the stairs to our right.  He leapt them two at a time, heading all the way to the top.  I took my time, reveling in the new brightness, riding the reality change, admiring how blood and willpower could change the world.  Clearly seeing the number three painted on the wall by the exit door, I set down one of my tanks and opened the door.  Holding it open with my foot, I went through.  Before walking through completely, I stopped, sticking my butt back out to hold the door open.  I set the one gas tank down to prop the door open and moved forward.  I figured that if I used a little over three quarters of the tank on this floor and the same amount on the second floor, I'd have enough to cover half of the first floor.

            I strutted down the barren hallway, ignoring the lack of lighting, and stopped at the far wall.  Reaching down, I unscrewed the cap on the gas can, putting it in my pocket.  Shaking the can back and forth, spraying the gasoline against the walls, the floors, everywhere, I started backing down the hall.  I was careful to watch how much I used.  By the time I had laid a slick of gas all over the hallway, I figured I had done pretty well at gauging how much I was using, and headed for the door to the stairwell, re-capping the can and pinching my nose at the strong smell.

            I picked up the second tank as I went out through the door and walked down to the second floor; this time, I used the lighter tank as a doorstop, laying it in the way of the closing door, as it wasn’t heavy enough to hold it open.  There, I did the same thing, showering the floor and walls with gas, drenching the soon to be sold building with its deathblood, even as I used my own to see.  Finishing there, I nearly skipped downstairs.  I couldn’t lie.  Maybe this was wrong, maybe this wasn't our building, and maybe we were doing little more than stealing it through extortion: but it was fun.  How many little boys have you known that didn't like to light things on fire; how many mothers have had to terrifyingly chastise their children not to play with fire?  There was something of a pyromaniac in the lot of us, whether it was the amazing transformation that things underwent when exposed to fire, the transitory nature such destruction had, or just the dancing, licking beauty of the yellow and orange flames, the crest of blue and white, too hot to touch, but real enough to admire.  Or maybe it was just the rush of blood.  I didn't know.  But I was having fun.  Then again, that was how ‘bad’ things often were.  They felt good at the time, but made us feel guilt later.  That's why the Church created confession, I guess.

            When I got to the first floor, Duvalier was already standing by the door, his half of the floor doused.  I shouldn't have been so surprised.  Nor should I have been surprised that his perpetual angry glare had replaced his gentle pedagogical glances of a few minutes prior.  Needless to say, I made my final dousing very quick and moved out and far way from the building as Duvalier bent down to light the fire.

            As I moved outward, everything seemed to slide into slow motion: the joy of blood-induced euphoric adolescent pyromania darting away in a sudden stab to the heart, replaced by tense fear.  Shit.  There was another car parked behind ours, a white car with red lights on top.  Poking into our dark, rolled down windows was somebody in a blue uniform wearing a badge.  Slowly, he looked up at me and gas tanks in my hands.  My legs hesitatingly pumped forward, spilling over the ground as if tripping seamlessly, smoothly: pulled on puppet strings, unable to speed up or away or to even stop.  I continued on right next to him, as he put his hand to his gun, flipping off the leather clip securing the gun in his holster.

            "Stop right there," he said to me.

            I stopped.

            "What exactly are you up to here, son?" he asked.  He eased the gun to a looser position in his holster, eyeing me suspiciously.

            I shrugged, unsure in my paralyzing eloquence, stumbling for words now like an adolescent on his first date. "I don't know.  Nothing."

            He pulled his gun out, nodding his head at the two gas tanks.  "What are those for?"

            I set them down carefully on the ground.

            "No sudden moves, son," he said.

            "Okay," I said, holding my hands out where he could see them, in what I hoped was a calming, peaceful gesture. "It’s cool.  My car ran out of gas.  I just went to the gas station down the street to get more."

            "Two tanks?" he said suspiciously.

            "The engine’s cranky.  One never does it."  I shrugged.  “It’s an old car.”

            "Back up," the police officer said, waving his gun at me.

            I did so, reluctantly.

            He kicked the tanks: first the one, then the other.  "Went for gas, hunh?"

            "They were closed," I said.

            "Right.  What the -- ?"

            I looked over my shoulder, only to see the building bursting into flames.  Jesus, Duvalier.  Good timing.

            "Okay, I think I've seen enough."  Still holding the pistol with one hand, the other went to the radio.  "This is unit -- "

            I don't think he would have seen it coming if my eyes hadn't went wide when I saw it.  I had noticed just the faintest ripple in the visible spectrum of light and realized that it was Him.  We couldn't exactly become invisible, but we could sort of cloud over how you saw us.  I'm not sure if it was mental or physical, but it was a neat trick.  I had to get Duvalier to teach me that one, too.

            The cop must have been blessed by God, nonetheless.  Either that, or Duvalier was just plain overconfident.  Because as Duvalier swung one of his empty gas tanks at the cop’s head, the cop somehow managed to duck and get off a shot.

            My jaw dropped as the suddenly apparent Duvalier went limp, a gun wound to the head.  Blood and grey matter splattered out of the back of skull as he clattered to the pavement.  The cop ignored the squawking of his chest radio and just stared at Duvalier, befuddled at how he had come out of nowhere, and horrified by the gaping hole in his head.  The cop had to be wondering how and why he was standing there with a smoking gun, looking down at a corpse.

            I was stunned.  Flat out stunned.  My jaw still hanging, my mouth wide open, I stepped closer, staring at the head of Duvalier.  You would have figured he would have lost more blood from that kind of a shot.  There was almost none since the initial wound.  In the movies, there was always a spreading pool of blood.  Not here.

            As if waking from a bad dream, the cop shook his head and looked up at me, his eyes wild.  "Back away," he screamed as I inched closer.

            "No, sir—I didn't—"

            "Don't talk!" he shouted.  "Who the hell are you and what the hell is going on here?"

            I looked over my shoulder at the raging blaze behind us.  Any calm I might have had was just shellshock.  What the fuck was I going to do without Duvalier?  There was no way I could take this cop and there was probably little chance I could get out of there by running.  Julien could probably get me out of jail, but not if he didn't want to be linked to the fire.

            "What’s your name?" the officer asked.

            "I—"

            "Your name!" he shouted again, still ignoring the squawking of his radio.

            I was lost.  I was at a total loss for to what to do.

            "Against the car," the cop said, pushing me against Duvalier's black Ford, kicking my feet apart.  He was patting me down, finding nothing, because I had nothing on me, and finally went for my wallet.

            "Dean, eh?  Dean Michaels?  Okay."  I think he was finally going for the radio when I heard the sickening crunch of his skull and felt the splattering of his blood on the back of mine.

            I spun around the hood of the car, stumbling away from the sudden violence.  There was Duvalier: no hole in his head, but stained with both his and the officer's blood, driving his fist into the officer's face over and over again, his rage palpable.  "Do you have any idea how hard that kind of a wound is to heal?" he was grunting as he pounded away.

            I was still stunned.  I wanted to stop him.  I wanted to scream Stop, Duvalier, you're killing him.  But that's what we did.  And even then, it was easy to rationalize that it was him or us.  Even knowing that, I wanted to do something.  But I couldn't.  I was paralyzed.  It wasn't like the movies where the rookie is fearless and steps in the front of every madness thrown at him.  This was real life.  And I was fucking paralyzed.  Paralyzed with pure unadulterated fear.  Fear of being arrested.  Fear of disappointing Julien.  Fear of an end of all I had learned.  Fear of getting between Duvalier and his rage.  Any grace I had had in dealing with the cop was gone.  Yet despite all my fear, I reviled what Duvalier was doing.  Violence was one thing to talk about, another to do in the heat of the moment, but all together different to watch.  He had hit the cop more times than he had needed to to kill him and way more times than he had needed to to render him unconscious.  I still wasn't even sure how Duvalier was even alive.

            Duvalier threw the officer's dead, dry body down, wiping the blood from his face, though it persisted to stick to his sideburns and chin goatee.  "Let’s go," he barked.

            Again on puppet strings, I did. "Get rid of this," he said, nodding towards the officer’s body, leaning over to pick up the gas tanks.

            "How?"

            "Throw it in the fire," he said.  He set down his gas tanks again, going for the keys to the trunk, fishing around his pocket.

            "You've got to be kidding me."

            "Do it," he said, tossing his tanks in the trunk.

            "No," I said.

            Duvalier stepped from behind the raised trunk. "Fuck him.  He's a human.  And he’s dead."

            "How the fuck are you even alive?" I asked.  "He shot you in the face.  Julien and Selene said that we're not undead, that we're not monsters.  That we are biologically human, we just feed on blood to live longer and to be stronger."

            "We are," Duvalier said, stepping forward and angrily tearing the dead officer off of the ground.  "Our blood is what keeps us young, though, at least those of us that should be dead by human longevity.  And blood is what gives us our powers and strengths."  He tossed the body over his shoulder and started walking backwards towards the fire.  "But when I get shot in the fucking face I lose lots of blood, and worse, I have to use lots to heal myself.  That wastes both my strength and vitality."

            "But why didn't it kill you or give you brain damage?"

            Duvalier was silent until he had tossed the body into the burning building and was on his way back.  "Because the blood acts as a back-up, a mold on which to recast your healed parts.  And this particular kind of regeneration is fucking expensive.  Thus, I was fucking pissed at that stupid fucking cop."

            I was still out of it.  What the hell was going on?  This wasn't what I signed up for.  This was wrong.  Whacking a cop was wrong.  That guy had just been doing his job.

            "Get in the car," Duvalier barked.

            "What did we do?" I muttered.

            "Get in the car."

            "What did we do?" I said louder.

            Duvalier looked at me from over the open door of his car.  "We may not be undead, Dean.  But we might just be monsters.  Get in the car."