Crime Rave (5 page)

Detective Atticus Red Feather

Y
ou’re accustomed to the feeling of
déjà vu
. Ever since you were a little boy you’ve had premonition dreams. Your grandfather called them visions, sent by The Creator. He stressed the importance of taking the visions seriously.

“Write them down,” Grandfather would say, in spite of being part of an oral culture. He knew that your half-white blood would require its own honoring. Balance is everything, that is the Lakota way.

In spite of his support, Grandfather wasn’t crazy about your white mother, the Indian bloodlines are already so watered down, and yours was still so strong. But all her kids look Lakota, and this made him happy. Not like all the other mixed kids you can’t even tell are Indian at all, save for their long braids and jewelry. Grandfather told you how he felt sorry for those Indian kids in limbo stuck between the white man’s world and the Lakota.

When you had the dream about your father’s death you told Grandfather. He was a stoic man, you’d never seen him so shaken. And when you had the vision that you, your mom, your brother and sister were driving to California, Grandfather’s heart broke. You could see it in his eyes.

“Why aren’t you coming with us?” You cried when the day came.

“I am the land, Atticus. And this land is me. Without this, without here, I will die.”

“Like a flower without water?” A nine-year-old desperate to understand.

“You are a smart boy,” he says. “Don’t let them change you.”

Nobody knew yet the lung cancer that would take Grandfather’s life was already too far gone to cure. He would die alone in his trailer, clutching a photograph of his son and family.

The only time you returned to Pine Ridge Reservation was for Grandfather’s funeral, just a year after you all left. The wind howled over the prairie. Tumbleweeds flying. His coffin was light, the weight of all Grandfather’s knowledge now gone to the Spirit Realm. You weren’t supposed to cry, but you did anyway. All the great men die eventually.

You honor his wish and you don’t let California change you. Every morning you make a tobacco offering. Every night a smudge ceremony and prayer. You grow your hair long. You wear Grandfather’s breastplate under your uniform on his birthday. You’re the first Indian detective in the LAPD. At least, the first one who admits it. Who knows how many of these guys are half-bloods, passing as something else to not be seen as a redskin.

When you make detective it’s because of your knack for solving cold cases. It’s the dreams, you see. The visions lead you to where the trail ended and show you how to pick it up again. You have several partners before Günn, but their intolerance of your heritage becomes a millstone. Detective Tonto, Injun, Prairie Nigger, the names they call you behind your back, and occasionally to your face after too many whiskeys. A rage simmers in you, but you never throw the first punch. And you never quit, though it’s clear your colleagues want you to. The inside outsider in the LAPD.

Nobody knows the real reason you’re there at all is because you’re convinced one day you’ll dream of the men who killed your father. You’ll find them, and your family’s deficit of justice will finally be repaid.

4:00 Spruce-Musa Hospital

R
ed Feather’s cell rings as he and Günn are still outside the wolf girl’s room.

“Captain, hey, what’s the news?” Red Feather puts it on speakerphone.

“Consider yourselves FBI deputized. I just got the word. The paperwork’s on the way, but we’re to work as if it’s already cleared.” Anderson still flexes and opens his stiff left hand.

“You serious? I’d think they’d want this all to themselves.” Red Feather never heard of the Feds giving up high-profile anything.

“Thought the same. But I guess damage control is the bigger problem since we got the perps and all that’s left is four witnesses. Bigger fish to fry now.”

“Well, okay then.” Red Feather rolls his shoulders, feeling the weight of the responsibility coming down hard.

Anderson’s voice is strained. “We moved all the body parts to the morgue already. We’ve got the ME’s people over there keeping an eye and patrolmen for security. Apparently the body parts are still growing. Fuck if I understand how.”

“Thanks for the update, Boss,” Red Feather says, staring at the wolf girl.

“How’s the interviews?”

“We just got here, but, where to start. Um, remember the girl in the wolf costume?”

“Yup, amputated leg. What?”

“The leg. It. Um. Grew back.”

Anderson is silent, but his heart pounds to a syncopated beat.

“I’m serious, Boss.” Red Feather cringes, waiting.

“The leg grew back.” Anderson wonders if two nips from his special flask are necessary. “She awake?”

“Not yet.” Red Feather pauses. “There’s something else.” He has no idea how to say it.

Anderson waits.

“It appears that her wolf costume, well, isn’t.” Red Feather hates the words coming out of his mouth.

“Come again?”

“You remember JoJo the Dog Face Boy from those old-timey carnival freakshows?”

“Yeah, so?”

“She’s like JoJo the Wolf Face Girl. It’s not a costume.” Red Feather feels embarrassed. He’s spending too much time with Günn. Her cynicism is rubbing off.

Anderson sighs, loud. “You know, I’m just trying to figure out how I went to sleep last night in Los Angeles and woke up in the fucking Twilight Zone.”

“I hear that, sir.”

Anderson clears his throat. “What about the other survivors? You talk to them yet?”

“On our way there now. Unless you want us to go to the morgue first?”

Anderson thinks. “Go talk to the survivors, I’ll send another team to the Morgue and you can meet them later. Maybe we’ll get lucky and Sleeping Wolfie will rise by the time you’re done with the others. Get to the morgue when you’re done.”

“Got it, Boss.”

Anderson hangs up. Red Feather pockets his phone and takes a long look at the werewolf snoring in her hospital bed. He forces himself to use the word werewolf even though it still doesn’t sit right on his tongue.

Günn’s sense of numbness deepens—
This isn’t real, this isn’t real,
she tells herself over and over. And damn her twitching eye.

Red Feather and Günn head back to the Nurse’s Station where Nurse Pratchett is waiting. Red Feather hands her his card. “If I’m not already here, call me the moment she wakes up.” Nurse Pratchett nods. “Now,” Red Feather continues, “where’re the other survivors?”

4:15 AM Beverly Center

T
he lines outside 2222 South Figueroa have never seen the like: dozens of thousands of concerned parents, family members, queued up with toothbrushes, combs, and other assorted DNA-bearing items belonging to individuals now presumed to have been at Charles Wallace Crane’s Hollywood hilltop rave. The sports field is now a mobile lab, in which dozens of cops, lab techs, and Red Cross workers collect DNA samples, carefully tagging the family and victim’s name. Each item a piece of wasted hope for a family who will never see their child again, nor have the luxury of a body to bury.

One lab tech can’t help but think about concentration camp lines. Another thinks of food banks in the 1930s, with all measure of person in bleak wait for their turn.

Hysteria abounds. Doctors dole out anti-anxiety medication and tranquilizer injections, offering information for trauma counseling services. In all these cases the expressions are the same: desperation, pain, fading glimmers of optimism. After all, each and every one has seen the footage of the devastated hill on the news.

Still, they plod forward, forcing one foot in front of the other. Every segment of Los Angeles society is represented here. The Beverly Hills moms who still took time to put on their faces before leaving the house. Maids who worry they’ll be fired for missing work today. Single parents, grandparents, guardians, and everything else in between.

Grief: ever the great equalizer.

Mother: The Ancient One

T
he grand and earthly soul scream that tears through the heavens wakes you from a thousand-year slumber, one from which you had hoped not wake for several hundred more years. From your vantage of everywhere and nowhere—the totality and singularity of omnipresence—you take stock of the perversions underway.

A young goddess—a new being, smog dwelling, childish thinking, abandoned by those who should have guided and protected her—has broken all the laws you set in ether before assuming your rest, including the most important:
Thou shalt not visibly meddle in human lives.
And The Ethereals, to fix Kaleanathi’s mistakes, are making it all the worse.

Where are The Watchers? Have The Angels abandoned their posts? Your mind brushes from itself the fog of a deepest sleep, psychic tentacles reaching out tentatively into the open atmosphere to take stock of the damage you feel in the everything and nothing that is you in repose.

Next come the first glimmers of anger. You kept order for thousands of millennia. You taught The Ethereals and The Elementals how to get along, work together, how not to encroach on roles that aren’t theirs. You set in place the checks and balances of universal maintenance. A blink of time later, and they’ve befouled it all almost beyond salvation.

Your anger deepens into rage, a violet aura pulsating with streaks of red. The Angels feel you now, waking up. And they have the good sense to be frightened. Mother doesn’t like being woken up early. She never did.

The cataclysm below has depleted the multiverse’s power source in a magnitude you never imagined possible. There’s nothing left to re-harness your own forces, which makes your rage catapult into fury.

This attention-seeking goddess is a force who got what she wanted: your full attention. Pity nobody warned her: Nothing good happens when someone has Mother’s full attention.

4:20 Spruce-Musa Hospital

T
he second survivor of the Crane Mansion Massacre is awake and lucid. A pale man, dark hair and Wolverine-inspired lambchops, who lived through America’s new greatest cataclysm with not one injury. Marvel upon marvel. He smiles at Detectives Red Feather and Günn when they enter with Nurse Pratchett, flashing two sharp incisors that glow against his skin.

“Hello, Nurse. Lovely to see you again,” he says in an accented voice.

Eastern European?
Red Feather wonders.

The nurse smiles at the old world charm. “These are Detectives Red Feather and Günn to see you.” She looks at the cops, a stern face. “You take it easy, and when he gets tired, that’s it. Interview over. Understood?”

Günn, irritated by Mary Fucking Poppins here, moves to retort that they’ll take their damn time and as damn long as they want, but Red Feather silences her with his
Not now
shake of the head. Red Feather smiles at the nurse, agrees, and watches as she leaves the room after sneaking another glance at her watch.

“I hear I’m something of a miracle,” the man says.

“I don’t know if miracle would be the word I’d use,” Günn says. “Inexplicable is more like it.”

“Isn’t that just a euphemism?” He smiles, the incisors give Günn the serious creeps.

“Are you a religious man, Mr.…?” Red Feather interjects, seeing that Günn is fiending for a new place to put her aggression.

“How rude of me. Icarus Lazlo, pleased to meet you.” He affects a gentlemanly bow from his bed, offers his hand to the detectives, and only Red Feather accepts. It is cool to the touch, dry and raspy, like old parchment left in a cool cellar. Red Feather and Günn stare at him; the silence turning awkward. Icarus clears his throat, breaking the detectives out of their reverie.

“Our turn to apologize,” Red Feather says. “I almost have no idea where to start. Did the nurses tell you where we found you?”

“They said I was one of four survivors after an explosion that killed thousands of others.” His accent gives the statement a formal, almost rehearsed, tone Günn finds unsettling.

Red Feather nods. “Correct. So, let’s not get into the hows and whys. Let’s just talk about what you remember about the rave party you attended last night.”

“It’s just called a rave,” Icarus smiles. Günn can’t help but think of Little Red Riding Hood’s wolf in grandmother drag.

“What do you want to know?” Icarus folds his hands in his lap and waits.

“Start from the beginning. Who’d you go with? What time did you get there? What happened during the course of the night?” Red Feather pulls up a chair, flips open his notebook while Günn sets up a video camera on a tripod.

“Is that contraption really necessary?” Lazlo looks concerned as Günn fiddles with the machine.

“The hell?” Looking through the viewfinder Günn sees only her partner and an empty hospital bed. Red Feather looks as well, puzzlement creasing his face.

“I was afraid of something like this,” Lazlo says, as an increasingly frustrated Günn tries to figure out what’s wrong with the machine. “You see, I can’t be captured on film.”

“And why the hell not?” Günn snaps.

Lazlo looks embarrassed. “Because I’m a vampire, of course.”

Günn feels the blood leave her head, it takes all her strength to fight past the white spots she’s seeing and use the wall behind her for support. Red Feather’s eyes are saucers.

“I’ll start from the beginning then, shall I?” Lazlo looks at Günn. “You’re at least getting my voice through?”

Günn plays back and a tinny representation squeaks from the camera mic. She nods. Red Feather scratches his head and sits back down. Even Günn sits. She can’t trust her legs right now and doesn’t want anyone else to see how badly they’re shaking.

Lazlo speaks.

“In the beginning. The year 1795. Prague. I was twenty-seven, already considered an old man in those days, unmarried and with only a small salary as the accountant to a nobleman. Each year people’s suspicions I was of that other persuasion mounted. But you see, I was in love with my employer’s daughter—that obsessive kind of true and tragic love the
Romeo and Juliet
romantics espoused—and knew I would never be considered a suitable match for her. No matter how much money I saved, no matter how high I rose in society. Not to mention, she didn’t even know I existed. It would have been a different story if my love had at least been requited.”

Lazlo laughs, a sound like only the heartbroken can make. It reminds Günn of a woodchipper; Red Feather thinks about the career drunks in White Clay just off the rez, waiting for the liquor stores to open.

“Each night I’d drown my sorrows in absinthe and whores. And then back to my pining the next day. It was a prostitute who turned me into this. She bit me, drained me, left me for dead. But—curse the Heavens—I didn’t die. I became one of her kind. A nightwalker. A revenant.

“For years, I was lost. I left cosmopolitan Prague for the countryside, feeding my thirst for flesh and blood. Ah, the pleasures of flesh I’d never known, my teeth sinking into its tenderness, sucking the marrow out of life, blood hot against my face and warm into me. I began travelling the world seeking fresh experiences. People taste different depending on where they come from; I became something of a connoisseur in human plasma. A picky eater.

“Fast forward to the recent past, 1997. I am now living in Los Angeles. Why travel when I have access to peoples of the world right here? I go to raves. The girls and boys are young and stupid. The lights are low. Nobody notices me in the corner, drinking away vitality. But what’s this? All of a sudden I feel so much. The music moves through me and within me. I must dance, I must stroke their hair, this feeling of love surges in me that we are all connected. Even my inhuman, monster self is connected to all the life revolving around the music, the throbbing bass, the warmth of their skin.

“Ecstasy, you see. First I had it through their blood and it irrevocably changed me. Then I got myself a pill. The feelings intensified. The pain I felt for all the lives I took washed over me in a tsunami.

“I wanted to die for what I’d done. I decided to kill myself, meet the sun for the first time in two hundred and two years. But I couldn’t. The love! There is so much love in this world. My soul had been returned to me, the one that whore stole centuries ago.

“I changed. No more killing. I would drink animal blood. I could survive. But women…How I missed the feel of them in my mouth. Their flesh under mine. And then one day I smelled my solution. It had been there all along—a way to drink human blood without hurting anybody. Menstruation. So obvious. Why had I never thought of it before?”

Günn feels sick to her stomach. Red Feather is fascinated, remembering stories his grandfather told him by firelight of men who aren’t men—men who drink blood, eat human flesh, shapeshift.

“In fact, my menstrual trend catches on fast. Who knew there were so many other walking dead—oh yes, so very many of us hiding in the shadows—who also carried a burden of guilt for past transgressions, searching for solutions? The other vampires call it Ichorism, and I became its unwitting prophet. We do not kill to feed, not even animals anymore. Our diet of menstrual blood is sufficient for us to survive, and thrive on lifeblood. Live and let live.”

Lazlo pauses, lost in thoughts of his journey. Red Feather clears his throat, waking Lazlo from his reverie.

“Forgive me, Detectives. When you’ve lived as long as I, it’s easy to dwell on the past. I have so rare an occasion to share these morsels of my history, as you can imagine. But you want to know about the party. Yes. So, I went to the rave alone. I was hoping to make some new acquaintances. When I drove up the parking attendants told me to park anywhere. There was no order, no rhyme or reason, cars were haphazardly placed. I remember wondering how we were going to get out. I guess we weren’t supposed to, were we?”

Red Feather shrugs, “Could be.”

“The inside of the mansion was insane. Again, no order to the architecture, as if twenty different people designed the structure all at the same time, and each was on a different hallucinogenic. An Escher painting come to life. The water was free, and that struck me as strange as well.”

“Why?” Red Feather furrows his brow, confused.

“The sale of water is a huge profit point for a rave. I’ve been to parties where they’ve charged ten dollars for one tiny bottle. And people pay it because you need the water. If you’re on E and dancing, you can die if you get too dehydrated. I’ve seen people collapse in seizures. That they were just giving it away was
très bizarre
. I took some, drank down my pill with it. About thirty minutes later I realized that the water was spiked with some kind of hallucinogen I’d never experienced before. When I started tripping, I had the feeling—like when I was outside—that someone wanted everyone at that party to be under the influence. The high felt strange. There was something in the air, a kind of malevolent electricity. It was everywhere.”

“That could’ve been the drugs,” Günn says, her forensics kneejerk.

“Maybe, but like I said, I felt it outside even before I took anything,” Lazlo rebuts.

Icarus remembers
—
but does not tell the detectives
—
a foyer filled with paintings. The smell intoxicates him. He realizes the art is painted with menstrual blood. He has the urge to put his tongue to the canvasses, but restrains himself. He tells one woman about the unusual painting material. “Gross!” She says. He tells another, one dressed as the pink Powerpuff Girl, and she is enthralled. She touches the painting. Icarus has never been so aroused in his life. There is something about her, too. A scent of fecundity, blooming. He can almost see the swollen lining of her uterus, flowing, releasing delicious blood and tissue. She’s different, her scent stronger than most. Icarus imagines she has more than one uterus, all the more space to produce the nectar he craves. She is high on a cocktail of Ecstasy and spiked water. He invites her to take a walk. Taste! He wants a taste! They traipse over a running creek, the stepping-stones in the shape of books that leads to the Mansion’s library. She is captivated by the shag rug. He can wait no longer. She says, “No, I’m on my period.” He says, “I don’t mind, I like it.” His face moves down to her source, he removes her tampon, puts it in his pocket for later. He drinks. She moans. He drinks more and more. Yes, this is no normal woman; her uterus is boundless. Icarus has never tasted lifeforce so sweet. His rapture is ultimate.

That’s when the creatures pop out. Small, birdlike girls, three of them, dressed like Charlie’s Angels. Icarus goes berserk. What kind of woman is this? Things living inside her? Offending him as he drinks of his pleasure. Rage sweeps over him, heightened by the blood and chemicals coursing through his body. As he watches, the three creatures grow, grow, grow to full size.

Icarus attacks. His instinct is to kill these aberrant creatures. They join hands and fire shoots from them. He burns, alight with their freakishness. Icarus collapses, comatose.

Icarus averts his eyes from the detectives and the camera. “I passed out at some point, now
that
must’ve been the drugs.”

Günn knows he’s hiding something. She smells burning flesh and has to keep herself from gagging. She looks over at Red Feather, giving him her look calling bullshit.

But how can only this part be a lie? How can he be a vampire at all?
Günn’s eye starts twitching again in tandem now with her shaking legs.

“When I woke up it was nearly midnight. Things started to get really weird. DJ Fetish started spinning—”

“Spinning?” Red Feather interrupts.

“Sorry, playing records. Spinning music. You know, how the turntable spins around?” Lazlo finds their ignorance of party culture adorable.

Red Feather nods. “Please continue.”

“The DJ started spinning and just like that people were dropping dead. Blood oozing from their ears. All these people, screaming and holding their heads, falling to the floor. The smell of blood was overwhelming, I haven’t had a drink in four years—that alone was crippling.”

“Why didn’t you get out of the mansion?” Red Feather asks.

Icarus gives Red Feather a long and serious look. “I tried. The smell of blood and death all around me, the pain in my head. I tried to get out of the mansion but I couldn’t escape the music. Speakers everywhere. I couldn’t find the front door. I kept opening doors and seeing stranger and stranger things. Perverse things. Gateways into hells I’d never imagined and don’t even want to think about. But no exit. And then the mansion exploded.”

“You remember that?”

“I felt the ground rumble, turned into a roar, like a troupe of Hell’s Angels passing through, then BOOM, a bright light. I felt my skin and eyes burning. The next thing I remember is waking up in dust, covered in ash and choking. But somehow, I felt fine.”

Red Feather closes his notebook and runs his hand through his hair. Icarus studies him, trying to unpack his mixed racial heritage, while Günn studies Icarus.

“Detective, may I ask
you
a question?”

“Go for it.”

“Why did he want to kill everyone?”

“He who?”

“The motel fellow, Mr. Crane. It was his mansion, right? He sponsored the party, why would he want to drug and murder everyone? Or is that why he threw the party? To kill us all?”

“We’re working on that.” Red Feather takes a photo from his pocket. “Did you see this man at the rave?”

Icarus looks at the face of a man aging badly. Gaunt face, eyes sunken in the hollows of his cheeks, sallow complexion, radiating bitterness. “Is that he?” Lazlo asks and Red Feather affirms. Lazlo turns his full attention to the man who tried and failed to kill him. He’s never seen him before in his life, Lazlo shakes his head no. Red Feather nods, pocketing the photo along with his notebook.

“Can you think of anything else, Mr. Lazlo?”

Icarus shakes his head, then says, “Do you believe in God, Detective?”

“Why do you ask?”

“You’re Indian, right? Oh, apologies,
Native American
.”

Red Feather nods. “It’s fine. And yes I’m half Lakota.”

“Your people believe in a sole creator?”

Red Feather nods. “But we also have other gods for different aspects of life who also play parts. Why?”

Lazlo considers the question. “I was raised Catholic, though I never was a believer, mainly because of that nonsense about Jesus rising from the dead. But now, I’m starting to wonder. How else did I survive? Who brought me back? And why me?”

Red Feather and Günn have no answer.

To prevent herself from dwelling on the question, Günn busies herself with the video camera, removing and labeling the weirdest victim interview ever known to the LAPD. Or so she thinks.