Fet had its entire weight on top of him. What was left of its mouth trembled as the stinger recoiled, ready to shoot.
Reflexively, Vasiliy grabbed the stinger as he would a rabid rat. He pulled on it, bending it free of the structure of the thing’s open throat. The thing squirmed and yelped, its dislocated arms unable to fight Fet’s grip. The stinger was like a heavily muscled snake, slimy and squirming, bucking, trying to get loose. But now Vasiliy was angry. The harder the thing pulled back, the stronger Fet pulled forward. He would not give up his tight grip, his good arm pulling with all his might.
And Fet’s might was immense.
In one final yank, Vasiliy overpowered the strigoi and ripped the stinger and part of the glandular structure and trachea from the thing’s neck.
The entity squirmed in his hand, moving like an independent animal, even as the host body twitched spasmodically, falling back.
One thick blood worm emerged from the writhing mess, crawling quickly over Fet’s fist. It slithered past his wrist and, all at once, began boring into his arm. It was drilling straight for the forearm veins, and Fet tossed away the stinger structure, watching this parasite invade his arm. It was halfway in when Vasiliy grabbed it by its visible, wriggling end, and yanked. He tore it back out, howling in pain and disgust. Again, reflex took over and he snapped the revolting parasite in two.
In his hands, before his eyes, the two halves regenerated themselves—as if by magic—into complete parasites again.
Fet tossed them away. He saw, exiting the vampire’s body, dozens of worms oozing out, slithering toward him through the fetid water.
His length of twisted steel gone, Fet said fuck it, ripping at the grate with his bare hands, pumped with adrenaline, tearing it loose and grabbing his empty nail gun as he jumped out of the duct and rushed to freedom.
The Silver Angel
HE LIVED ALONE in a tenement building in Jersey City, two blocks from Journal Square. One of the few neighborhoods that had not become gentrified. So many yuppies had taken over the rest—and where do they come from? How come they never end?
He climbed the steps to his fourth-floor apartment, his right knee creaking—literally creaking with every step—a squeak of pain jolting his body again and again.
His name was Angel Guzman Hurtado and he used to be big. He still was big, physically, but at age sixty-five his rebuilt knee hurt all the time and his body fat—what his American doctor called his BMI and what any Mexican would call panza —had overtaken his otherwise powerful figure. He sagged where he used to be taut, and he was taut where he had once been flexible—but big? Angel was always big. Both as a man and as a star—or at least what resembled it in his past life.
Angel had been a wrestler—the Wrestler back in Mexico City. El Angel de Plata. The Silver Angel.
He had begun his career in the 1960s as a rudo wrestler (one of the “bad guys”), but soon found himself embraced, with his trademark silver mask, by the adoring public, and so adjusted his style and altered his persona into a tecnico, one of the “good guys.” Through the years he fashioned himself into an industry: comic books, fotonovelas (corny photo-illustrated magazines narrating his strange and often ridiculous exploits), films, and TV spots. He opened two gyms and bought half a dozen tenements throughout Mexico City, becoming, in his own right, a superhero of sorts. His films spanned all genres: western, horror, sci-fi, secret agent—many times within the same feature. He took on amphibian creatures as well as Soviet spies with equal aplomb in badly choreographed sce
nes full of library sound effects—always ending with his trademark knockout blow known as the “Angel Kiss.”
But it was with vampires that he discovered his true niche. The silver-masked marvel battled every form of vampire: male, female, thin, fat—and, occasionally, even nude, for alternate versions exhibited only overseas.
But the eventual fall equaled the height of his climb. The more he expanded his brand empire, the more infrequently he trained, and wrestling became a nuisance he needed to put up with. When his movies were box-office hits and his popularity still high, he performed wrestling exhibitions only once or twice a year. His movie Angel vs. The Return of the Vampires (a title that made no syntactic sense, and yet encapsulated his film oeuvre perfectly) found new life in repeated TV airings, and Angel felt compelled by fading fame to produce a cinematic rematch with those caped, fanged creatures that had given him so much.
And so it came to pass that one fine morning he found himself face-to-face with a group of young wrestlers made up as vampires in cheap greasepaint and rubber teeth. Angel himself walked them through a change in fight choreography that would have him wrapped three hours early—his focus less on the film at hand than on enjoying an afternoon martini back at the Intercontinental Hotel.
In the scene, one of the vampires would nearly unmask Angel until he miraculously freed himself with an open-palm blow, his trademark “Angel Kiss.”
But as the scene progressed, filmed amid sweaty technicians at a stifling stage in Churubusco Studios, the younger vampire thespian, perhaps enraptured by the glory of his cinematic debut, applied a bit more force than necessary to their skirmish, and threw the middle-aged wrestler down. As they fell, the vampire adversary landed, both awkwardly and tragically, on his venerable master’s leg.
Angel’s knee snapped with a moist, loud crack, bending into an almost perfect L—the wrestler’s anguished scream muffled by his halfway torn silver mask.
He awoke hours later in a private room at one of Mexico’s best hospitals, surrounded by flowers, serenaded by well-wishers shouting from the street below.
But his leg. It was shattered. Irreparably.
The good doctor explained this to him with genial forthrightness, a man with whom Angel had shared a few afternoons of craps at the country club across from the film studios.
In the months and years that followed, Angel spent a great deal of his fortune trying to repair his broken limb—in hopes of mending his fractured career and recovering his technique—but his skin hardened from the multiple scars crisscrossing the knee, and his bones refused to heal properly.
In a final humiliation, a newspaper revealed his identity to the public, and, without the ambiguity and the mystery of the silver mask, Angel the common man became too pitied to be adored.
The rest happened quickly. As his investments faltered, he worked as a trainer, then bodyguard, then as a bouncer, but his pride remained, and soon he found himself a burly old guy who scared no one. Fifteen years ago, he followed a woman to New York City and overstayed his visa. Now—like most people who end up in tenements—he had no clear idea how he had gotten here, only that he was indeed here, a resident in a building quite similar to one of six he used to own outright.
But thinking of the past was dangerous and painful.
Evenings, he worked as the dishwasher at the Tandoori Palace downstairs, just next door. He was able to stand for hours on busy nights by wrapping lengths of duct tape around two broad splints on either side of his knee, beneath his trousers. And there were many busy nights. Now and then, he cleaned the toilets and swept the sidewalks, giving the Guptas enough reason to keep him around. He had fallen to the bottom of this caste system—so low that now his most valuable possession was anonymity. No one had to know who he once was. In a way, he was wearing a mask again.