Attempted Immortality (Withrow Chronicles Book 4) Read online

  Attempted Immortality

  Michael G. Williams

  To my many friends, always up for adventure.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Epilogue One

  Epilogue Two

  About the Author

  Other Works by Michael G. Williams:

  Falstaff Books

  1

  My old black trench coat billowed behind me in another gust of salt-soaked ocean wind as I leapt from the roof of one house, cleared thirty feet of open air, and came down running across the roof next door. The geezer in front of me didn’t bother to look back. He clamped one veined, liver-spotted hand around an exhaust pipe jutting out between shingles and used it to swing himself in a graceful arc, feet forward, toes pointed like an Olympic gymnast. With flawless grace and speed to match my own he arced out of sight beyond the gutter like a salmon slipping over the top of a dam: a glint of belt buckle and pale skin in the starlight and he was gone.

  I was too smart to fall for that, flipping a couple of unlikely somersaults – given my, uh, generous proportions – and digging in my heels to skid into a parallel run along the edge of the roof rather than going over. A complete set of deck furniture shot through the air where I would have been had I followed him: four chairs, a glass-top table, and one of those big umbrellas hurled like a spear. I let myself laugh once, just a clapping yelp of defiance, something to let him know I was still in the game and having a great time.

  There was a great crash of shattering glass below so I did a neat pirouette into open air, came down on the deck, and smashed headlong through the other half of the sliding glass door the guy had just shattered. He was ahead of me by a few yards and this was one of those beach houses with multiple decks, multiple sliding glass doors, so he smashed right through the one opposite. A blast of frigid Atlantic air blew through the ink-dark room. Rental property checklists and tourism brochures spun through the air on the funneling wind as I bounded over the couch and coffee table. Thank the Devil the place was empty in the off-season: the closest thing to human habitation in the place was a pile of dirty laundry someone left behind. I didn’t envy the cleaning crew who had to get this place ready for summer, either. The whole house stank of dinner someone must have left out last autumn. I threw the right lapel of my coat over my face and crossed the room so fast I passed through the cloud of glittering glass shards before they had time to hit the ground.

  I heard my target’s footfalls, light as a feather, as he ran across the deck and bounded up onto one corner of the railing. I drew back the lapel of my coat to see where he went and was just in time to watch as he took a leap so long and so high it looked like he might be about to take flight.

  If I were going to follow him I had to go now but it was going to be a hell of a jump, even with my strength. I shouted as I shot into the air after him, pedaling my legs like the air itself were a bicycle. I waved my arms in big circles, watching with jealousy as he nimbly landed on the tips of his toes, up a flight and across the street. Scrabbling to make it, knowing I wouldn’t, and without an inch to spare, I arced upwards through the night, over the street, toward the other house, and slammed chest-first into the gutter he’d so ably cleared. Before gravity could grab me I dug my fingers into the wood under the shingled roof and held on for dear life.

  The senior-citizen-looking motherfucker I was chasing took his chance to laugh in turn at me, throwing my own earlier guffaw back in my face. He was so distracted by his moment of triumph he didn’t hear my mad cousin Roderick shout from nearby, “Wabbit season!” It took me a split second to remember that was his way, a la the old Bugs Bunny cartoon, of yelling, “Duck!”

  Out of the darkness came a dozen aluminum softball bats, thrown like they were on a truck when it fell over. They weren’t going to hurt a vampire, of course, but they sure as hell surprised him. Tripping over his own feet, the old guy went ass overhead and face planted, then rolled and tried to right himself. Roderick was already on him, knocking him down and holding him there, black plastic go-go boots digging into the guy’s thighs and my cousin’s spidery little hand pressing the guy’s jaw into the roof of his own mouth while the other boxed him in one ear.

  “Stop hanging around and get over here, Cousin,” Roderick said through gritted teeth. “This one wishes to escape.”

  I hauled myself up and over the lip of the roof with a horrible, straining groan – no matter how strong I was, the angle was terrible and gravity has always worked against my apple-shaped frame – and rolled into a crouch to walk over. “Do we recognize him? Is he on the list?”

  Roderick twisted the guy’s face back and forth and shook his own head. “I don’t know. You tell me.”

  I stepped around and stared at the guy. His fangs were out and his eyes were wide and rolling around in his head like crazy. He had huge bags under them, the drooping and flabby skin of one who aged before the era of Botox or even Oil of Olay. He looked vaguely familiar to me but he wasn’t for certain one of the ones the Interloper – an elder vampire who tried to set up shop in my back yard a year ago – had seen before. I’d drained the Interloper of all his blood and, with it, his memories about the conflict between ancient vampires of yore and the modern vampires of our time: the here and now. Taking people’s memories when I kill them is my thing, but I don’t do it often. It isn’t the killing that bothers me: it’s the memories. I may be trying to live forever but there are still some things I’m willing to respect about the dead – and some things I just don’t need to know in intimate, mystical detail.

  “I… maybe,” I finally said. “I don’t get, like, an encyclopedia. I get flashes and… it’s like I watch it all go past really quick and it all sticks but that isn’t the same as knowing.” I shrugged and made a disgusted noise. In truth, I could get a better understanding than that, but it took practice. The Interloper wasn’t my first but he was pretty close. Back then, when all this was happening, I was a lot less certain of myself and of my powers.

  Roderick gave me a look of mild frustration, like I was trying to tell him about a movie but couldn’t remember its name: you know, that one, with that guy, who does that thing. “Oh, Cousin,” he said, “Just eat him to be sure. See if he knows anything. If nothing else, he is a trespasser in your declared territory.”

  I smacked my lips a couple of times and tried to think of a way to do this – to do exactly what Roderick suggested – without also having it be an assertion of my authority. I was the self-declared boss of all the vampires of North Carolina, sure, but that didn’t mean I wanted to act like a dictator.

  The guy looked maybe ninety, spindly, shrunken with age when they turned him, and he was dressed in a canary yellow golf shirt and plaid pants so loud you could hear them on a bad connection in the middle of a hurricane. He screwed up his face and hissed out a few words. “My people will avenge me,” he whispered between clenched teeth. “Kill me and they will make your death worse by a thousand fold! We will finish what we started!”

  “Oh, fuck you,” I growled. I hadn’t wanted to kill the guy to prove I was in charge but I sure as hell didn’t mind doing it if it was going to piss off my enemies. I twisted him out of Roderick’s grasp, flipped him over, and planted a knee in his back. “Got any last words, asshole?” He sucked air
between his fangs to speak but I cut him off. “Just kidding. Nobody cares.”

  He screamed when I sank my fangs into his throat, and I couldn’t help thinking what a wimp of a vampire he was. There’s raging against the dying of the light, sure, but there’s also dignity.

  It turned out his memories were plenty useful, too. That was how we found out about the Italian restaurant, and, from that, how we wound up in the enormous mess the sleepy little town of Sunset Beach would turn into by the time the month of March was over.

  An hour later I was standing in the dark, beside Roderick, on a slightly elevated platform in a restaurant called Cacciatore – Italian for “hunter,” Roderick told me. We’d gone right away to the site of the only clue I’d gleaned from the old guy’s memory: that this was his base of operations, and that he shared it with another vampire and their human blood bag. We didn’t want to waste time, and we didn’t want to give his companions the chance to realize he’d been chased down and bumped off.

  Out of sight behind a huge red curtain, I reflected on the possibility there is nothing lonelier than a beach town in the off-season. Waves crashed audibly against the sand outside, in an old and simple song: one about oblivion and distance and how in the end we’re always alone under cold and careless stars. Each pounding breaker invited anyone in earshot to step off into that endless expanse of moonlit high tide, if only to see what happens to those freed of the cares of the living.

  I wasn’t being all melancholy as hell for my own sake, mind you. Mostly I was wondering about these sorts of things because I figured the next poor sap I aimed to murder probably wasn’t.

  I think that sort of thing is why vampires love and hate these off-season tourist trap towns in equal measure. Sure, we can be exquisitely alone under a jillion tiny stars, normally lost in the light pollution back home, but we are never closer to the gulf of mortality we think we’ve outrun – and believe me, we’re running from death just like anybody. We just hopped a ride halfway through to get way out in front.

  Any person, viewed from the appropriate angle, can be described as the sum of every fear they’ve tried to escape over their life. A vampire is no different. Chief among those fears, always, for every single one of us, is death. And the best way to overcome that fear, we eventually find, is to become the agent delivering it unto others. We tell ourselves the world is all kill or be killed, and we choose the former every time. It can be enjoyable, or it can be a burden, or it can be just another night at the office. Sometimes we kill just to give the universe the bird. Sometimes we do it to pass the time when we’re bored. But sometimes, and more often than most of us would admit, we do it to prove we can, to tell ourselves we’ve still got it going on. We score a few points just to show we can still make the shot.

  Sunset Beach is a tiny little vacation sandbar perched on the Tar Heel side of the line between the Carolinas. Roderick and I were not there on vacation. We were in search of vampires. The town, if you could call it a town, mostly consists of a couple of gas stations, a grocery store, a Tex-Mex restaurant, Cacciatore, and a few other places. There’s an old planetarium doing laser light matinees to progressive rock soundtracks and, in good weather, letting audiences view the actual stars through its huge glass domed roof. There are the offices of a chiropractor who wandered in from somewhere and the orthodontist he married. There’s a golf course lined with townhomes owned by rich snowbirds with Florida plates.

  There are houses, too: lots of houses, hundreds of houses, but they’re investment properties rented out by the week and don’t quite make the cut for being homes. Most of Sunset Beach is on an island separated from the mainland by a long, tall bridge over the Intercoastal Waterway. Beach houses there scrunch together, densely packed across two thirds of the real estate. Each is raised up on tall stilts in case of inundation by flooding from a hurricane tide. Most of the rental properties have borderline criminal names based on dad-joke-level puns: things like “Shore Enough” and “Dune Time”. In any given warm weather week they would be rented out to sprawling families or giggling co-eds but it was the end of winter and that time of year they mostly sit idle. A handful of them are actually occupied by the owners: those few who chose to pass the cold months getting sandblasted by the Atlantic’s whipping off-season winds. The rest sit dark, empty as a new grave, dust gathering in the corners.

  The disused houses are unattended from October to May and, not to put too fine a point on it, easily compromised. I’ve known more than one vampire who goes every winter to a town just like Sunset Beach – silent, barely inhabited, utterly unaware of the vampire’s presence – to spend a couple of nights listening to the waves murmur that oblivion song. On the short winter days between, with certain death high in the cold sky, any such bloodsucker simply crashes in the pitch-dark laundry room of an unoccupied rental. Why not? It isn’t like anyone will notice them. Hell, even another vampire couldn’t find them in that place: the winter wind carries off our predatory stench along with all the other trash it picks up.

  I figured all that was why Sunset Beach was where my enemies had holed up: plenty of anonymity, oodles of available real estate, and endless opportunities to hide.

  A year before, when we took out the Interloper, we found out the ancients had resurrected one of their own: immensely powerful, destructive beyond belief and dumb as buying a secondhand toothbrush. Whatever they got back from that resurrection ritual, it wasn’t a vampire with any agency or force of will. It was more like an appetite with super powers. Roderick and I knew they were hiding it somewhere, trying to figure out what to do with it. We even knew it was somewhere Down East, the southeastern corner of the state of North Carolina. It’s all swamps and beaches and legends of ghostly leopards. That was a lot of ground to cover, though. I could spend eternity combing tobacco fields and get absolutely nowhere. Then Roderick pulled a name out of a hat: Marty Macintosh.

  A couple of years ago Marty was the very first vampire to tell me there was more going on in our history – and our present – than I’d ever known. He showed me a map he’d made of disappearances in the Asheville area. It led me to a hidden vampire lord in the mountains: the Transylvanian, a redneck old bastard with a bunch of spawn of his own. Marty had been brainwashed out of being able to tell me directly what he knew, but he strained at those bonds, sweat bullets the whole time, to get me to connect the dots.

  After that, I sort of gave Asheville to my cousin to keep an eye on things for me. I was more than just a little surprised to find out Marty was still alive after my cousin moved there. I figured Roderick would probably hunt him down and kill him for being too smart.

  Marty ran a bunch of numbers on our current question – where are the elders? – and coughed up Sunset Beach as the answer. I don’t even really know how he came up with it, but Roderick said his methodology and results were, and I quote, “almost clairvoyant in nature”. Roderick was impressed, and nothing ever impresses Roderick. He’s been too cool for school since the 1960’s.

  Marty’s a counter, which happens sometimes with vampires. We’ve all got our quirks. Mine appears to be getting dragged into the deep end of the vampire political pool when what I really want is to stay home and watch something interesting on the tube. Roderick’s main quirk seems to be giving everyone the ever-loving heebie-geebies. Marty’s thing is math and pattern recognition. It’s like he’s got a sixth sense for the stuff. Just don’t spill any race in his path if you want him to do anything useful for the rest of the night.

  “This is absolutely ridiculous,” I whispered to Roderick in the darkness. “This is never going to work.”

  Smiles stood by my side, alert as ever, his nose twitching up and down as he sniffed in the direction of the curtain.

  Roderick didn’t respond to that. Instead, he whispered, “So have you been back to Power Company? Or anywhere else?”

  I sighed. “Now is not the time,” I murmured. I was not interested in having a conversation with Roderick about whether I’d been
hanging out at the gay bar he roped me into visiting back home.

  “Alright,” we heard someone say in the room beyond the curtain, from the restaurant’s dining area. “Whenever you’re ready to get started.”

  Roderick pulled out his phone and opened the camera app. “I want to preserve this for posterity,” he said to me with a wink in the darkness. Roderick is just plain better at living in the modern world than I am. He speaks the language of now. He knows the landscape of its veins in a way I just can’t seem to grasp. Watching him type on a phone is like watching a professional secretary on a Selectric II from back in the day.

  We heard a knock on the front door, and someone stood up and started walking across the room. Like most restaurants in Sunset Beach, Cacciatore was officially closed for the off-season, but we knew the truth of it: the vampires who owned it and lived there were inside, doing what they spent all winter doing according to the memories of the one I’d killed: they were auditioning bands to play on their small stage during the summer months.

  “Answer the question,” Roderick said to me. He meant business. “Have you been to Power Company? Have you gone on a date?”

  There was another knock at the door to the restaurant, more insistent this time.

  “Yes,” I finally hissed. “I’ve been to Power Company, goddamn it. Once or twice.” I frowned at him in the dark. “Okay, a few times.”

  Roderick smiled and half-closed his eyes. “And did you meet any nice boys?”

  The curtain started to rise.

  “You are holding the bass guitar in an incorrect manner, Cousin,” Roderick whispered. “Also, you should smile.”