“Okay,” Matilda said softly. “Give me your wrist.”
The crowd seemed to close in tighter, watching as Lydia held out her arm. Matilda crouched low, bending down over it.
“Take the knife away from his throat,” Matilda said.
Lydia, all her attention on Matilda, let Julian go. He stumbled a little and pressed his fingers to his neck.
“I loved you,” Julian shouted.
Matilda looked up to see that he wasn’t speaking to her. She gave him a glittering smile and bit down on Lydia’s wrist.
The girl screamed, but the scream was lost in Matilda’s ears. Lost in the pulse of blood, the tide of gluttonous pleasure and the music throbbing around them like Lydia’s slowing heartbeat.
Matilda sat on the blood-soaked mattress and turned on the video camera to check that the live feed was working.
Julian was gone. She’d given him the pass after stripping him of all his cash and credit cards; there was no point in trying to force Lydia to leave since she’d just come right back in. He’d made stammering apologies that Matilda ignored; then he fled for the gate. She didn’t miss him. Her fantasy of Julian felt as ephemeral as her old life.
“It’s working,” one of the boys—Michael—said from the stairs, a computer cradled on his lap. Even though she’d killed one of them, they welcomed her back, eager enough for eternal life to risk more deaths. “You’re streaming live video.”
Matilda set the camera on the stack of crates, pointed toward her and the wall where she’d tied a gagged Lydia. The girl thrashed and kicked, but Matilda ignored her. She stepped in front of the camera and smiled.
My name is Matilda Green. I was born on April 10, 1997. I died on September 3, 2013. Please tell my mother I’m okay. And Dante, if you’re watching this, I’m sorry.
You’ve probably seen lots of video feeds from inside Coldtown. I saw them too. Pictures of girls and boys grinding together in clubs or bleeding elegantly for their celebrity vampire masters. Here’s what you never see. What I’m going to show you.
For eighty-eight days you are going to watch someone sweat out the infection. You are going to watch her beg and scream and cry. You’re going to watch her throw up food and piss her pants and pass out. You’re going to watch me feed her can after can of creamed corn. It’s not going to be pretty.
You’re going to watch me, too. I’m the kind of vampire that you’d be, one who’s new at this and basically out of control. I’ve already killed someone and I can’t guarantee I’m not going to do it again. I’m the one who infected this girl.
This is the real Coldtown.
I’m the real Coldtown.
You still want in?
Talking Back to the Moon
Steven R. Boyett
Out of the Santa Monica Mountains they walked south through the San Fernando Valley on the broken thoroughfare of I-5, threading their way among corroded cars and shattered pavement. Worn-down houses and burned-down condos and broken-fronted convenience stores to either side. The shorthaired girl sunbrowned and thin in baggy cargo shorts with bulging pockets, nylon backpack with toy figures dangling from the zipper pulls and a bedroll tied beneath. A worn and faded black babydoll tee shirt with a glittery rabbit iron-on gone dull in strips where the outer coating had peeled. Sheathed bowie knife half the length of her arm hanging from her cabled belt. Bright yellow wraparound sunglasses. Multicolored Adidas walking shoes and mismatched socks. A different color of nail polish flaking on each ragged nail. The centaur huge and gaunt beside her like a stick-figure drawing of a mythical centaur. Dark and angular and alert. Tapered head not much wider than the muscular stalk of neck. The mouth a line sawn into the dark face like a healing scar from ear to hard triangular ear. Javelin in extra-jointed hand and pannier occasionally clinking with the gait of his odd tricornered feet. Not hooves and not paws but something in between, as if some reptile had evolved to something equine.
The girl pulled a roadmap gone furry at the folds from its backpack pocket and turned her back to the wind and leafed through it without unfolding it. She looked south as if to match what she saw to what her map depicted.
Do cities all look the same to you? she said. I mean not the same, but like any one place you are, you can’t tell where you are cause it looks like all the other places.
Don unnastan.
Yeah, okay. She folded the map and returned it to its backpack pocket and they resumed walking. Santa Ana winds sent ripples through the freeway grass.
She sat up in he
r sleeping bag. The faceless dark above her. The bowie handle in her hand. She hadn’t been aware of reaching for it.
Chay stood watch near the vinecovered overpass support. They’d lit no fire and would not while they were in the Valley. Bottled water mixed into an MRE pouch was good enough for now.
She drank flat soda water and got out of her sleeping bag and went to pee. She came back and stood silent near Chay unmoving as some roadside sculpture. She set a hand against the centaur’s flank. The pebbled hide warm. Neither of them spoke here where the underpass would echo and a normal voice could carry a quarter mile. The moon already set and concrete ghostly in the starlight. Nightsounds in the darkened world. Derelict cars on the freeway like foundered boats rotting on some bedroughted reef.
She moved her hand to her chest and closed her eyes. No moon out to call forth her former wildness. Was it there to answer, any part of it? Could it be restored? This is why we’re heading south.