Sandman Slim with Bonus Content (38 page)

Eleanor says, “Shut up, Jed Clampett. Jethro is waiting for you to blow him in the parking lot.”

Everyone laughs but Jed.

While Eleanor does an “Evening at the Improv” thing for her dead friends, I do a Hellion chant over and over, keeping my hand in the glass and letting the blood flow. For once, Hellion’s guttural grunts work in my favor. The Lost Boys think I’m moaning.

“Why were you following me, asshole? Did Mutti send you? Mom, I mean? Does daddy know? All she has to do is put on her knee pads and she can get him to do anything.”

The wind starts as a breeze from the back of the theater, sweeping down from the balcony and ripping down the rotten curtains that flank the dead movie screen. Eleanor drops the comedy act and the others go silent as the wind picks up force. Now they’re the ones unsteady on their feet.

Even though I can’t read the dead like the living, vampires still have minds and I feel around for Eleanor’s. I can’t tell you her lottery numbers or her kitten’s name, but I can pick up images and impressions. She’s gone from pissed to nervous and is steering into the skid, heading for scared. She hasn’t been a Lurker long enough to run into anybody with real hoodoo power and she can’t figure out what’s happening.

Mommy is in her head, too, a black hole of anger and fear. Eleanor might even have gotten herself bit just to spite her. She has a secret, too. She thought it would save her in the end, but now she’s having her doubts.

A gust blasts down the aisle like an invisible fist, knocking all five of them ass over horseshoes into the air. Eleanor loses the two-by-four and lands on top of me. I can smell the fear through her burned skin. The wind keeps going, moving up from Hurricane Katrina to space shuttle exhaust.

With all her strength, Eleanor pushes herself off of me.

“It’s him! He’s doing it!” she yells. “What do we do?” Jed Clampett hauls his ass up off the floor and pulls himself to me using seat backs like crutches. I’ve changed the chant, but he hasn’t noticed yet.

The wind shifts from a wind tunnel to a swirling twister. I haul myself to my knees and shrug off my leather jacket. The twister rips the carpet from the floor, throwing a junk-yardful of broken glass into the air. The shards circle us like a million glittering razor blades, which doesn’t do much more than annoy Eleanor and her friends. They bat the glass away like flies. Each of their hundred cuts heals before the second hundred happen. But I’m getting cut, too. In a few seconds I’m the fountain in front of the Bellagio Hotel and all that broken glass is doing a water ballet in my blood.

The swirling air turns pink as I bleed out, which Jed and his girlfriend think is goddamn hysterical. They stick out their tongues and catch drops of my blood like kids catching snowflakes. About ten seconds later they’re both screaming and tearing open their throats with their fingernails. Then the other three start to feel it. They try to run, but the wind and glass are everywhere. It’s one big Veg-O-Matic in here, spraying my tainted blood down their throats and onto their million wounds.

Eleanor already looks like a Chicken McNugget, so it’s hard to tell what’s going on with her, but the others are starting to sizzle and glow from the inside like they swallowed road flares on a bet and lost. That’s what happens to vampires dumb enough to drink angel blood.

It doesn’t take long for them to go catatonic, then flare fast and hot. Human flash paper. They sizzle for a few seconds and cook down to a fine gray ash. I growl the end of the hex and the air grows still. The vampires are all dead, except for Eleanor. She hunkered down and held on to me during the twister. My body blocked enough of the wind for her to survive, but just barely. She moves her cracked lips like she’s trying to talk. I lean my ear close to her.

“When you see Mutti, tell her I’m sorry. I only did what I did to scare her like she scares me and Daddy sometimes.”

When you’re hired to kill someone, the last thing you want is to have to give them absolution. You want them dead fast, not lying there asking you to be their therapist. Worse, you don’t want to hear anything that might make you feel sorry for them. I don’t want Eleanor’s mommy trauma in my head. She’s a monster just like me, but I want her to be a dead monster like her friends. She lets go of my leg and gives me a Say Good Night, Gracie sigh. A couple of minutes ago, I wanted to stick her on a spit and toast marshmallows on her while she burned. Now I cover her eyes with my hand and get out the black knife.

“Don’t move.”

Songs quoted.

Ballad of Thunder Road
by Don Raye and Robert Mitchum
© 1958 Universal MCA Music, ASCAP. All rights reserved.

I’m Waiting for the Man
by Lou Reed
© 1967 Oakfield Avenue Music, Ltd. (BMI). Rights for Oakfield Avenue
Music, Ltd. (BMI) administered by Spirit One Music (BMI). All rights reserved.

KILL THE DEAD
. Copyright © 2010 by Richard Kadrey. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

FIRST EDITION

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

ISBN 978-0-06-171431-3

10  11  12  13  14
OV/RRD
10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

EPub Edition © 2010 ISBN: 9780062066640

R
ICHARD
K
ADREY
has published four novels, including
Butcher Bird
and
Metrophage
, and more than fifty stories. He has been immortalized as an action figure, and his short story “Goodbye Houston Street, Goodbye” was nominated for a British Science Fiction Association Award. A freelance writer and photographer, he lives in San Francisco. His dramatic, primarily fetishistic photography can be found at www.kaosbeautyklinik.com.

www.richardkadrey.com

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This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

SANDMAN SLIM
. Copyright © 2009 by Richard Kadrey. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

FIRST EDITION

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

ISBN 978-0-06-171430-6

09  10  11  12  13
OV/RRD
10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

EPub Edition © 2010 ISBN: 9780062066640