Teeth_ Vampire Tales - Ellen Datlow [77]
For the second time, Joshua laid himself on the soft earth, acrawl with ants and cockroaches, centipedes and earthworms, positioning his upper body beyond the reach of the streaming sunlight. The light’s color was deepening, its angles rising until they were almost parallel to the ground. Evening was settling over the earth.
The vampire pressed the long fingers of one charred hand onto his chest, as delicately as a lover. Heat flushed Joshua’s body. Every nerve ending was a trembling candle flame. The vampire touched its lips to his throat; its tongue sought the jugular, the heavy river inside. It slid its teeth into his skin.
A sharp, lovely pain.
Joshua stared at the underside of his home: the rusted pipes, the duct tape, the yellow sheets of insulation. It looked so different from beneath. So ugly. He heard footsteps overhead as somebody he loved moved around inside it, attending to mysterious offices.
* * *
Four days ago: he’d stood on the front porch of his home in the deep blue hollow of early morning, watching the waters of the Gulf roll onto the beach. It was his favorite time of day: that sweet, lonesome hinge between darkness and daylight, when he could pretend he was alone in the world and free to take it on his own terms. In a few moments he would go inside and wake his five-year-old brother, Michael, make him breakfast, and get them both ready for school, while their mother still slept in after her night shift at Red Lobster.
But this time belonged to him.
The vampire came from the direction of town, trailing black smoke and running hard across the no-man’s-land between his house and the nearest standing building. There’d been a neighborhood there once, but the hurricane wiped it away a few years ago. What remained had looked like a mouthful of shattered teeth, until the state government came through and razed everything to the ground. Their own house had been badly damaged—the storm had scalped it of its top floor, depositing it somewhere out in the Gulf—but the rest had stood its ground, though it canted steeply to one side now, and on breezy days you could feel the wind coming through the walls.
It was over that empty expanse the vampire fled, first billowing smoke like a diesel engine and then erupting into flame as the sun cracked the horizon.
The vampire ran directly for his house and launched itself at the opening to the crawl space under the porch steps. Oily smoke eeled up through the wooden planks and dissipated into the lightening sky.
Joshua had remained frozen in place for the whole event, save the rising clamor in his heart.
Their mother would be late getting home from work—and even later if she went out with that jackass Tyler again—so Joshua fed his little brother and directed him to his bedroom. On their way they passed the stairwell, which was capped now by sheets of plywood hammered over the place where it used to open onto the second floor.
“You want me to read you a story?” he asked, reaching for the copy of The Wind in the Willows by the bedside. Michael didn’t really understand the story, but he liked it when Joshua did the voices.
“No,” he said, leaping into his bed and pulling the covers over himself.
“No story? Are you sure?”
“I just wanna go to sleep tonight.”
“Okay,” Joshua said. He felt strangely bereft. He reached down and turned on Michael’s nightlight, then switched off the lamp.
“Will you cuddle with me, Josh?” he said.
“I won’t ‘cuddle’ with you, but I’ll lay down with you for a little bit.”
“Okay.”
“Cuddle” was a word their dad used before he moved away,