Anno Dracula (50 page)

‘At his expense?’

‘How well you know me, my best beloved.’

‘It’s in the to-do book. I’ll have his package by the time you pop out of your coffin at sunset tomorrow.’

‘Excellent. Then tell security Adam Simon is never to be allowed on this lot again. Deadly force is authorised if he attempts to violate the ruling. In fact, I want you to buy a big bottle of liquid paper and obliterate his name from all our records except the legally binding contract he just signed. Your primary instruction is never again to speak the name “Adam Simon” in my presence. Am I understood?’

‘Yes, Master.’

Alucard parked his liver-purple Camaro in the handicapped space outside the Video Archives on Sepulveda. He was dead and you couldn’t get more handicapped than that. Little people didn’t see it that way. Beverly took care of parking fines. He was putting the kids of the Los Angeles Traffic Control Bureau through fancy Eastern colleges. He hoped they got brutally hazed by the Brotherhood of the Bell.

The videos he was returning were in a wino-style brown paper bag on the passenger seat. He checked the titles. Sometimes, what with all the confusion, tapes wound up in the wrong boxes. Video Archives fines added up too. Last week, he’d meant to return
Can I Do It Till I Need Glasses?,
sequel to
If You Don’t Stop It You’ll Go Blind
and little-known debut of Robin Williams, but the box contained a home-shot video of one of Vampi’s predecessors in the act of predeceasing. Quentin, the warm kid behind the counter, made an offer on the rights, saying he had customers who went for viper snuff. A fanged snarl and a hundred dollar bill, prerolled and red-dusted, settled the business. He had the
Glasses
tape and his other rental selections of the week, Carol Speed in
Abby,
Dyanne Thorne in
Greta the Torturer
and Bette Midler and Barbara Hershey in
Beaches
. He made a mental note to approach Midler for the Transylvania Concert, though he was also tempted to see if there was a way of having her quietly killed.

Crossing the sidewalk, he saw through the windows, between cardboard standees of Cynthia Rothrock and Jessica Tandy, that a holdup was in progress. A bald-headed viper in a net-mesh muscle T-shirt and rose-tinted glasses held an unnecessarily large handgun on Quentin, who was reaching for the sky like a cowboy extra. The video kid wore a Hawaiian shirt and sunglasses, and was talking. Thick veins throbbed in his thin arms and wrists, and his Adam’s apple bobbed under his scraggle of goatee. Dead customers lay on the floor in pretzel poses, great holes blown out of them. Pooling blood was fast going rancid. A waste. A guy in a tan suit was being bitten — chewed, rather — by an undernourished vampire girl in a Raggedy Ann red wig, spangly halter top, short shorts and cha cha heels. The victim was trying to ward off the vampire with a cassette of
King Kong Lives.
The critics were right — you
should
die before watching that.

Alucard didn’t want to put off returning the tapes. He’d driven all the way out here to Hermosa Beach. As he pushed open the front door, an old-fashioned bell tinkled.

‘What about that motherfucking
Green Acres,
man,’ babbled Quentin, ‘that pig Arnold sure was a smarty-pants!’

‘You talkin’ to me about
sit-coms
, ninety-eight-point-six?’ asked the viper.

‘Sit-coms, man. Life and death, man. No difference, not really.’

The bell finally registered, catching everyone’s attention.

The bloody-mawed girl left off her meal — blood pulsed out of the dying man’s neck — and fixed Alucard with violet-red cat eyes.

‘Good evening,’ said Alucard. ‘I’m returning some tapes.’

The hold-up man angled his head up in the air with a ‘why me?’ eyebrow-lift and swung around to face Alucard, pointing his big gun. He did the thing rappers did on videos, holding the pistol sideways as if it were laid flat in the air. Looks fuck you cool, debatably reduces the likelihood of an automatic jamming and screws up any chance of aiming properly — though this specimen had hit what he was firing at so far. His gun was a revolver, a ridiculous Western relic with a foot-long barrel.

‘Who the fuck are you?’

‘A man with video tapes.’

And I’m Kit Carruthers, a viper with four convictions for murder one.’

‘How careless. I have no convictions at all.’

‘What I’m sayin’ is: I go down, I’m for the Rock. Understand, Granpa Munster. That’s as bad as it can get. I just friggin’ don’t care what happens. Me and Holly are going to red dust afore they take us in. We’ll drag as many losers to hell with us as possible. Get it?’

‘You believe in reincarnation, man?’ asked Quentin. ‘You all know, in a second life, we all come back sooner or later, as anything from a pussycat to a man-eating alligator...’

On cue, the cat-eyed Holly projected her nose, mouth and chin into a snout. Her skin turned to scaly hide. A thousand wickedly curved teeth gleamed, blooded. From pussycat to man-eating galligator, in a nictitation.

If it weren’t for her brain-dead b-f, this little viper would have potential.

‘What’s he talkin’ about?’ said Kit.

‘He’s quoting the theme for
My Mother, the Car
.’

‘This fuckin’ town. Doolally La-La Ville. Got anythin’ worth havin’? Or should I stake you straight off.’

‘I don’t care to be talked to like that.’

Kit snarled, gums receding above inch-long ivories. Tattoos swirled on his shaved head.

‘Then eat silver,
Granpa
!’

He fired the gun one-handed, which would have broken a warm man’s wrist. The kick flung his arm off to one side. Alucard knew Kit should have held his gun in a proper grip. The silver slug shot past, took off Jessica Tandy’s head, and smashed through the window. Alucard got out of the way, swiftly.

Kit’s eyes were goggle-open, bigger than the round rose lenses in front of them.

‘Where’d he go?’

Alucard was in the porno alcove, an arched-off recess with a hand-lettered ‘Pee-Wee’s Playhouse’ sign. A customer huddled against the far wall, clutching
Lust in the Fast Lane
to his forehead. He recognised the bearded middle-aged man as blacklisted screenwriter Jack Martin.

‘I’ve seen that, Jack,’ said Alucard. ‘I wouldn’t recommend it. Of the Rac Loring oeuvre, I’d suggest
Talk Bloody to Me
3.’

Martin shut his eyes and held the box over his forehead.

‘He’s here, Lambchop,’ hissed the gator-girl, pointing. ‘In with the dirty movies.’

By the time Kit had thrown a shot at a rack of
Buttman
tapes, Alucard was up on the ceiling, braced in a corner. Kit pointed his gun at Martin’s skull but didn’t shoot him. The warm writer whimpered. If Martin made it through the next five minutes, Alucard might kick him a dialogue polish on
Untitled Dolly Parton.
He had been out in the cold for a long time. Another of the many lives wrecked by
la belle Geneviève.
They should form a support group.

Alucard skipped across the tops of the racks, arms out like wings, trusting the Father. He stayed light enough not to topple the flimsy units.

‘Sister Bertrille, man,’ said Quentin. ‘
The Flying Nun
.’

Alucard descended, settling his feet on the ground.

Kit came charging out of the Playhouse, dry-firing his pistol. Click, click, click.

‘All out of buwwets,’ said Quentin, doing Elmer Fudd.

Kit tossed the heavy revolver like a knife, aiming for Alucard’s head. The gun seemed to take an age to make it across the room, turning over and over and over. Alucard reached up and took it out of the air as if it were a dove. He squeezed and the brittle antique burst into pieces. He pitched a fistful of metal chunks — cylinder, empty cases, butt — which hammered against Kit’s slab of chest.

‘Who
are
you, Granpa?’

‘Death.’

‘That your name?’

‘No, it’s my avocation. My name is Alucard.’

Holly was up on the formica-top counter, more cat than lizard in her claw-tipped paws, but with a red-green iguana frill around her neck and a crest rising under her thick-curled wig.

‘Kill him, Lambchop,’ she advised.

‘I’m tryin’ to do that little thing, Bloody Holly. Honest I am. But some nights, it gets real aggravatin’.’

‘How did you like
Greta,
Mr Alucard?’ asked Quentin, nerving back up to confidence. ‘Most of my customers say it doesn’t cut it stacked up against the first two
Ilsa
movies, but I’m an
auteurist.
I’ll take even the lamest Jess Franco flick over any five Don Edmunds pictures you care to mention. Franco draws Dyanne Thorne out like no other filmmaker. The only other male director who can get anything like the same mileage from actresses across the talent spectrum is George Cukor.
Greta
is Franco’s answer to
Heller in Pink Tights.’

‘We tryin’ to have a face-off here, little man,’ said Kit. ‘Me and Granpa. It might improve your chances of long-term survival to keep your fuckin’ yap zipped.’

Holly wound herself around Quentin, flicking a forked tongue at his goatee. The video clerk babbled himself silent.

‘Better,’ said Kit.

Alucard stood his ground. The Father was with him, was
inside
him. His mentacles extended, probing around the store. He latched onto Jack Martin —

Oh god oh man oh god oh man oh god oh man isn’t that
John Alucard
oh god oh man I’m gonna
die
oh god oh man wonder if he’s read the
American Zombie
treatment oh god maybe if we have to have survivor guilt counselling together I can bring the subject up oh god oh man who am I kidding I’m dead oh god oh man

— and withdrew sharply, then felt around the sub-sentient fudge of the guy on the floor who wasn’t dead yet but was on the way out. From the mess of his mind, Alucard gathered he had been an attorney —

No one will goddamn care about this gurgle gurgle like Sarah said when she found out about Linda this country thinks there ought to be a bounty on lawyer pelts gurgle gurgle will I come
back
turned into a pale thing gurgle that might be

— and then he was dead, forever. He got a fix on Quentin, who was coping with the situation by recasting it with ’70s exploitation actors -

I’m like a
Slaughter-era
Jim Brown coiled and ready to explode into ass-kicking action... Kit is Andy Robinson in
Dirty Harry
with maybe an overlay of Andrew Prine as the bald psycho in the TV movie
Mind Over Murder...
the girl is maybe Marlene Clark in
Night of the Cobra Woman
or Cheryl ‘Rainbeaux’ Smith in
The Other Cinderella...
and Mr Alucard stands there like Joe Don Baker playing Buford Pusser in the original
Walking Tall,
packing a baseball bat in his pants...

— and a soul soundtrack, Bobby Womack’s ‘Across 110th Street’. Alucard kept Quentin in mind, then wound his mentacles around the girl’s head, sliding easily into Holly’s engorged lizard brain and simply turning her off. He could have mindwiped her with a wink, but she might be worth saving for later. He gave Quentin a nudge and he took Holly’s sudden weight, keeping her from falling off the counter. He picked up her floppy arm and laid a paw over his shoulder.

‘So, you’re Death. Or Alucard. That’s what the geek called you, right?’

‘It’s a name.’

Kit pondered hard.

‘There’s something about it. A L U C A R D. Like a crossword puzzle or something.’

‘Everyone says that,
Lambchop.
“Alucard” is “LaDacru” written inside-out.’

Kit didn’t get it.

He had been shifting, replacing his lost weapon. His fangs, as impractical as the eleven-inch barrel Alucard still held, stretched his mouth, giving him Godfather jowls, ripping his lips. Triangular bone-thorns sprouted from his fingertips and knuckles, while scythe-spars slid from his elbows. Kit was a less natural shapeshifter than Holly. Each barb cost him effort and pain. He groaned and sweated blood.

‘Die, Death,’ growled Kit.

He was across the room with vampire quickness, hands about Alucard’s throat, scythes at his sides. But his touch was gentle. Alucard saw puzzlement in Kit’s eyes and nodded downward. Kit followed Alucard’s eyeline and stood back.

The gun barrel was stuck into Kit’s chest like a pipe. An inch or so projected from the front, dribbling blood. Kit twisted his neck and looked down at his back. The length of steel hadn’t transfixed him entirely. Alucard heel-jammed the end of the barrel, knocking it flush with Kit’s skin, pushing the ragged end through the other side.

Kit’s heart poured out.

Alucard licked his palm. Kit’s blood was polluted with snakebite. He took only a symbolic taste of the fallen vampire.

Shaking his head to clear it, Alucard let everyone go.

The Father thrilled through his blood.

Quentin, the girl still slumped over his shoulder, tore up a sheet of paper. ‘You get free rentals here for all time, Mr Alucard. You’re like the Fonz of this Arnold’s, the Skipper of this
Minnow
.’

‘That’s kind of you,’ he replied, handing over the paper sack of videos, which he had held all along.