Thirsty - M. T. Anderson [49]
Bongo. Bongo the dog.
Jerk must have named him, years ago, when he was little. When Jerk was just a little Jerk, his parents’ hope and joy and all, saying, “Lesss call him Bongo. The puppy. Bongo.”
And I think about Jerk finding the corpse, drained and twisted. And I must remain human. I can’t believe what I want to do.
I will remain human at any cost. I drop the dog.
The second I let go, Bongo is barking like mad. I run, but he’s chasing me, and barking, and now I really don’t know what I’m going to do.
The road is slapping under my feet, and I’m heading down under the streetlamps.
He stands barking, barking, barking at me under a stop sign, as if that were the speech balloon translation.
But I run on, through the suburbs. I run past the funeral home and its lawns, under the sagging power lines, past the darkened windows of the twenty-two-hour convenience store. I run under the railroad bridge.
I am going to search the woods for a raccoon or something. I am not cold, and I do not mind the company of twisted trees and haunted bracken. I am doing the haunting now.
I have to keep spitting because my saliva is so thick and choking. I really want to kill, and I think how people like Tom would be surprised because they don’t think of me as very wild or savage or strong.
I envision the raccoon’s death: I see my shirt torn from the little claws; I rip it off, yanking my way down the row of buttons. I see myself sucking on the carcass, on the thick sweet blood, and it runs down my wrists to my bare chest and drips on my belly, mingling with my own blood, and I smear the skin over my own skin.
And in my vision, I stand in the dawn in the devil’s orchard by the water tower, watching the sun rise over the reservoir, full of life, the blood caking warmly on my pale skin as the three radio towers blink and blurt out their silent soft rock like gagged victims bleating for help. The sun throws sludgy scarlet smudges over the morning clouds. The trees are full of life; and in the dawn, they are ruby like gore.
That is my vision.
But I find no raccoons.
I look for hours. Nothing. Trees.
I walk for the rest of the night. A light drizzle falls as morning approaches. All the while, I am thinking that I will never be the same again — that’s the terrifying thing — that Chet will not come, and that I will never be the same again, and that I will be condemned to endless wandering, wandering through tiny towns and lying down in alleys in big cities, lying drunk or in wait of victims, forgetting that I grew up at all, forgetting this life of green avenues and my brother’s dumb swears and my mother’s voice and my father’s quiet love of golf.
Chet will not come, and I will have to flee. They will chase me. The crowd will want to kill me.
I think of Tom — untrustworthy, eyes narrow — and of my father — mute and nervous — and my mother — “It wasn’t even human” — about the changeling child on TV — “It wasn’t even human” —
And a voice says to me again and again this one chilling fact I know is true: that I came into this world from a warm place within someone else; but that I will leave it completely alone.
I walk through the woods until I come again to the road. I start home. My shirt is intact.
I am a failure, even as a vampire.
When I reach my house, it is dawn. My mother is waiting for me in the kitchen. She’s dressed in a pink bathrobe, but it looks gray in the dawn. Everything in the kitchen looks gray: the table looks gray, and the dishwasher, and the sink, and my mother, too, who is in a chair.
“Where have you been?” she barks at once, suspiciously. “Where the hell have you been? Where?” She hits the table. “Where the hell have you been?”
I have to make up an excuse, but the sun is coming up and I’m suddenly very, very tired. I’ve been out almost all night, since midnight. “I just went out, just now, to, um,” I explain groggily, “check the tree.”
It is admittedly not the best or most coherent lie I have ever made up.
I shuffle past her toward the front hallway.
“Christopher! Stop, Christopher,