Tomorrow's Dead: The Julia Poe Vampire Chronicles (31 page)

“Your humor has never amused me, Julia Poe.  Your disagreeable self will end tonight,”
he said, rising. 

Poe jumped when Earl whispered in her ear.  She’d forgotten about the halfdead.  “Let’s
book, Poe.  The guy’s insanely accurate.  We’ll be Swiss cheese.”

“You go,” she said with her last dying courage.  She pulled him behind her.  Waiting
for her brain to conjure up something interesting to say, Poe stared at Nesbitt. 
“So you’re a waste,” she said finally.  “You have boring vampire powers.  You’re just
a good shot.”

Nesbitt’s face darkened.  “I am no such thing.  I am one of the most powerful vampires.”

Poe scratched her head, wishing she’d tied her hair back.  “That’s because they’re
all dead.  I killed them.  Besides, I bet I can kick your ass in hand-to-hand combat.”

Like an angry kangaroo molested by cars and industry, Nesbitt leapt from the ground
to the wooden chamber dais.  From there he hopped and landed in front of Poe who instinctively
jumped forward.  She met his angry body and shoved her knife into his ear.  She would’ve
aimed for his heart, but the dead was wearing Kevlar, and his left arm had suddenly
extended an extra two feet and encircled her upper body. 

Nesbitt cursed like a barman at the blade still lodged in and burning his eardrums
with garlic acid.  His snake arm squeezed her torso slowly but vindictively.  She
heard two of her ribs crack.  Earl shot at the vampire from behind so as not to injure
Poe, but the master vampire unwound his hand from Poe’s body and plugged him with
his Perazzi.  Poor Earl had no idea that the left-handed shooter was wearing a bulletproof
vest.  The halfdead that Poe considered a friend in the short time spent with him
tumbled with a groan on the frosty marble floor.

Poe tried to cry out, but her broken ribs constricted her breathing.  She staggered
to one of the dead guards and unslung his Beretta.  She ran as fast as she could to
momentary safety behind a marble pillar.  For the usual stupid reasons she’d neglected
to wear protection herself.  She’d always reprimanded Sainvire for not donning Kevlar,
and there she was facing a foe that was most likely a better shot. 

“Good.  You’ve chosen a gun, Julia Poe.  Now we can finally crown the superior shooter,”
said Nesbitt with a haughty voice laced with pain. 

 She breathed through her mouth, the pain on her side so excruciating that inhaling
was like taking in shards of glass.  “That’s why you broke my ribs?  So you can win? 
You’re a lousy dime-a-dozen master vampire.  So what that your arm grows like a dumbass
Gumby cartoon?  Your powers are embarrassing for your social grade.  I killed this
vamp once with a long-ass snake tongue, and he had more dignity and class than you’ll
ever muster.  That’s why you hide your embarrassing secret powers.”

Nesbitt growled and fired at the column she was hiding behind, blasting down chunks
of polished marble.  One hunk of cheese-size marble clunked Poe on the head and cut
her scalp.  Blood seeped over her forehead.  With annoyance she wiped at the blood
before it reached her eyes.  Nesbitt emptied his Perazzi before unsheathing a Purdey. 
Before he could fire once more, a commanding voice halted the bickering of the two
hawk-eyed nemeses.

“Enough, Nesbitt!” said a bald Sainvire with a dangerous blaze in his eyes and a massacred
hoodie riddled with holes.  He looked as though he had been blown to bits and reformed
into a less dignified master vampire.  Truth be known, Sainvire preferred to dress
down than dress in Armani suits like the master vampire she was fighting at the O.K.
Corral of the vampire age.

“Ah, Kaleb, the master vampire traitor who’s been a pain in my joints for a generation. 
You’ve come to rescue your princess?” he mocked.

“Certainly not.  Julia can take care of herself.  She’s a superhero, haven’t you heard? 
I’ve come to watch her kick the shit out of you,” said Sainvire with a smile of steel.

Poe shook her head when Sainvire turned to her.  She pointed at her ribs to convey
that she was in a lot of pain and he should take care of Peter Nesbitt himself.  Of
course she couldn’t have expected the vampire to understand the meaning of hand and
eye gestures.

“Julia Poe is no more than a girl.  I broke her, and she is no match for me.  Can
you smell her blood?  She is injured.  But you with your speed and powerful nails—”
said Nesbitt.  Before he could finish his thoughts, he raised his weapon and fired
five shots at Kaleb Sainvire, hitting him three times in the forehead and twice in
the heart.  The Los Angeles master vampire fell backward with a loud thud by the column
Poe was hiding against.  His gray eyes remained open with the same stunned look of
the blue hats lying dead on the municipal floor.

In shock, Poe didn’t even scream.  She wanted to hurl herself on the love of her life
and protect him, but she knew that the bullets would pop out of his body after a few
minutes.  Sainvire was close to indestructible. 

“There’s your boyfriend, girl, finally erased from this god-awful world,” chuckled
Peter Nesbitt.

Poe took a deep painful breath and closed her eyes
.  Mom, Dad, Xena, help me.  Give me my old confidence back
, she prayed. 
Let Sainvire be alive
. 
Help me do this, Maclemar.
  With her eyes still closed, she snuck her right hand around the pillar and concentrated. 
She visualized where Peter Nesbitt’s voice originated from and calculated.  She fired
once and she heard a tumbling sound.  Poe, with self-assurance, walked away from the
pillar and approached Peter Nesbitt with halting, pain-filled steps.  The dapper man
who was sage to Quillon Trench writhed on the floor and clutched his throat. 

Without smug words Poe stood over him and fired all 13 rounds into the despot’s face
until he resembled pulped pomegranates. 
Nobody hurts my man
, thought Poe while ignoring the pain from her side.  She dropped the gun only when
the vampire’s legs stopped twitching.

As quickly as her broken ribs would allow her, she walked to Sainvire and sat down
on the floor.  He hadn’t moved since Nesbitt shot him.  Poe examined his heart.  The
two bullets were ejected by Sainvire’s garlic-immune body.  She seethed that Kaleb
again came to a gunfight without Kevlar.  The three bullets to his forehead were burrowed
in his brain.  The vampire was unmoving.  She stayed with her lover, holding his hand
and praying to all her patron saints. 

A swarm of people came and went to check on Sainvire’s state of health.  Sara and
Mina examined him after picking up their brother’s corpse and placed him on one of
the wooden tables in the chamber. 

“He’s not responding to your voice or to any ministrations, said Mina.  “You have
to be brave and accept that Kaleb is gone just like my brother Earl.”

Poe shook her head.  “He’s not dead.  Garlic bullets can’t touch him.  See how these
two bullets popped out of his chest?”

“But these bullets penetrated his brain.  Brain injury is different from—”

“Thanks for your input, but Kaleb isn’t dead!  Bullets can take a while to leave his
body, that’s all,” said Poe confidently.  “I’ve shot him in the kneecaps so many times,
and sometimes they took longer to pop out.”

Mina shared a look with her sister.  The girl was odd, but shooting Sainvire on purpose? 
Her own lover?  Quietly they left Poe cradling Sainvire’s bald head on her thighs
and ignoring the pain at her ribs. 
Déjà vu
, she thought as her lips trembled. 
First Maclemar then Sainvire.
  She ran her hands on his bald head and mentally slapped herself.  “You’re not dead,
Sainvire.  I know it, so wake the fuck up!” she ordered.  Already she could feel and
see black stubble on his head.  Kaleb was alive, and she’d kick Xena herself if the
warrior said any differently. 

Hours passed until Li interrupted her prayers to Sister Ann, Goss, and Megan.  “It’s
going to be dawn soon, Poe.  You have a flight to catch.  We’ll take care of Sainvire
here,” said the usually callous man in a display of sincere humbleness. 

“I’ll take care of him,” said Poe blisteringly.  “He’ll wake up.  Don’t worry about
that.  Have someone carry him to the car.  Then we can go.”

He’s not dead.  We’re just starting our lives together.  I don’t believe life can
be this cruel.  First Maclemar then Kaleb.  There’s no way both of them would be taken
away from me when the world is finally healing,
she thought, biting down tears. 

***

Rufus’ usual good humor left him as the body of Kaleb Sainvire was fastened securely
in the back of the plane.  Poe’s unintelligible chanting which he’d guessed was praying
buzzed uncomfortably.  A bursting pregnant woman named Lucy and a 50-year-old custodian
called Jimena sat behind him.  They had been waiting with their meager possessions
when he landed the plane at the Mission. 

The two claimed that Poe had promised to take them to Los Angeles.  Always the doubter,
Rufus believed a bomb was hidden in the bulk of Lucy’s stomach and Jimena was a collaborator. 
After a half-hour, however, Poe arrived with Mina, the short-hair blonde carrying
the limp body of Kaleb Sainvire.  He helped fasten him onto the back of the plane,
and he thanked the pretty vampire.  For the sake of assuaging his paranoia, Rufus
laid a hand on Lucy’s stomach and jumped when he felt a kick that was definitely no
bomb.

“Kaleb, wake up,” said Poe over and over while willing the bullets to leave her lover’s
brain.  “You can’t leave me.  You just can’t.”  And her words were drowned by the
humming single-engine of the Cessna.

T
HE
MOOD
IN
THE
city was one of mourning.  Kaleb Sainvire, their leader and friend to the browbeaten,
could enduringly die.  Fear reappeared in the residents’ hearts.  The vampire was
more appreciated now that he might be gone from the world.  Like Perla said to Maple,
heroes are only appreciated when they die.

The entry wounds on Sainvire’s forehead had closed, but no bullets exited.  Joseph
sat pensively on a chair by his best friend’s side and held Kaleb’s cold heavy hands. 
“I met him over 40 years ago,” he said more to himself than Poe who hugged her knees
to her chest on the corner of the room.  She didn’t deserve to sit on a chair when
she was the cause of Sainvire’s death.  Still bandaged from the kick to the ribs,
Penny curled on the floor.  Friends to the last bone, she and Poe had similar injuries.

She wanted to give Kaleb’s friends the chance to visit him, but she refused to leave
the room.  Her suspicion that one of them would take Sainvire’s body away and bury
him kept her vigilant.  The vampire was alive she was sure. 
Any
day now and the bullets will leave his head.
  The fact that Kaleb was intact and slumbering on his simple full-size bed proved
he was still battling.  Most vamps would have oozed into jelly and deteriorated by
the third day.  Kaleb had been reposing for 10 days.

“I met him in a movie theater.  It was a Roger Corman flick, I think,” continued Joseph
whose signature smile was nowhere to be seen.  “We were both shadowing a sadistic
vampire who called himself Fulgar and wore a black cape with red silk lining.  Total
tool,” he said as the top of his lip twitched at the memory.  “It was painfully hard
to concentrate on finding Fulgar the Disillusioned when a bevy of heavy-breasted beauties
on screen distracted us both.  Fulgar the Idiot believed himself to be a combination
Vlad the Impaler and Jack the Ripper.  He’d drain prostitutes and hang their mangled
bodies on city landmarks for everyone to see.”

Poe’s haze lifted.  Neither vampire had told her how they’d met.  Too submerged in
her own world, it never occurred to her to ask.  “I spotted him, and so did Kaleb. 
We had to leave glorious breasts the size of melons behind.  We followed the freak,
and with my speed got to him before Kaleb.  When my fellow vamp catcher flew down
to corner the bastard, we had a fight on our hands.  Then the dilemma of who was going
to kill him.  ‘Since you already have him, you can kill him,’ he said.  I’ve always
tried to avoid direct violence, so I insisted he do it.  He had those fearsome nails,
so why not use them?”  Joseph shook his head slowly, and a true smile touched his
lips.

“Then what happened?” Poe asked when Joseph didn’t continue.

“We decided to kill Fulgar at the same time.  A double homicide, you can say.  I was
to break his neck, and Kaleb was supposed to nail him in the chest.  And so we did
it and threw Fulgar’s miserable body in Lake Michigan.  We’ve been inseparable ever
since.”

“Sounds like a love story,” said Poe with a tired smile.

“It was.  I loved him as a brother and vice versa.  I was willing to lay my life for
him, and it was the same with him.  Kaleb had a conscience, and I’d like to think
I do, too.  We were politically on the same page, and we both loved this country. 
And then there was Megan.” 

“I miss Megan.  We all miss Megan,” said Poe, scratching an old scar.  She hadn’t
bathed since they arrived in Los Angeles, and she was disgusted by the grime under
her fingernails, her oily hair, and her redolent scent.  She didn’t remove her shoes
for fear of suffocating Kaleb and finally killing him off.

“Poe, let Kaleb rest.  He’s truly dead.  I don’t want to have to see him leaking and
turn into a pool of sludge in a couple days,” Joseph said forlornly.  “He’s done so
much for this city and all of us.  He deserves Peace.  He can be buried at the cathedral
next to Maclemar and Gregory Peck, your favorite men.” 

Poe wiped her runny nose on her sleeve.  “No.  I’m telling you he’s still alive. 
I mean for a vampire.”

“Morales declared him actually dead,” insisted Joseph.  The girl threatened to shoot
her old friend and everyone who insisted that Sainvire was gone.  Maple, Passionada,
Perla, Habib, Rufus, Michelle, Danby, and even Percy tried to plead with her, but
her heart knew the truth.