Vampire Miami (2 page)

The bus drove a quarter of a mile, rumbling
along steadily. Christina stared stoically ahead, and Selah
examined the back of her head, wondering if she could persuade her
to help. Her life back home had never seemed so distant, so unreal.
She tried to think, but could only watch, and then the bus pulled
off the I-95 onto an exit ramp.
Opa Locka Blvd
, the large
green sign said,
Exit 17
. Down the ramp and then off the
road onto a large cleared parking lot, newly flattened and with the
remains of the old buildings mounted high as rubble along one far
side and bus shelters along the other. Selah studied them as the
bus driver slowly turned his huge steering wheel, hand over hand,
and guided the bus to a stop in one of the great parking spaces. A
number of people were resting in the shade, some lying down, others
seated on benches. They watched the bus with empty stares, their
bodies emaciated, their clothing ragged.

“Time to go, Selah,” said Christina from the
front. Her voice had hardened. Selah sat still, her mind blank.
“Selah,” said Christina, and began to walk back toward her, face
grim.

She wanted to sit still, to never leave the bus,
to remain frozen and forgotten there in the back, but then she
thought how she must look. A little mouse, terrified and small. Her
old anger flared up, the thick-headed part of her that made her do
stupid things and say things she shouldn’t or get into trouble when
it was so easy not to. She stood, lifted her chin, and looked
Christina right in the eyes.

“Don’t worry. I’m coming.” Selah gathered her
case from where it had tumbled to the floor, and pulled it up. It
was heavy, but she pretended it wasn’t. “Let’s go.”

Christina held her gaze for a beat and then
nodded. Turned, and walked back to the front. Selah followed,
trying to not let her suitcase bang into every seat. The other
soldiers had already stepped out onto the asphalt where they had
formed a loose perimeter, rifles held by their sides. When she
reached the front the old driver looked at her, his eyes deep and
old and sad, and he nodded, a quick dip of his wrinkled face. “Good
luck, little girl.”

Selah didn’t respond. She struggled down the bus
steps instead, wrestling her suitcase down with both hands, and
then stepped out onto the thick black loam of the tarmac and into
the Florida air. Hot and humid and thick. Selah blinked as she
looked around the bright, sunlit parking lot.

“All right,” said Christina, sorting through the
papers in her folder. “Where’s your grandmother? Do you see
her?”

“I’m right here,” said a voice, slow and
powerful and familiar to Selah like a hand cupping her cheek, like
a deep and wide river flowing ever by and allowing no denial. They
both turned. Mama B walked up and placed her hands on her hips,
ignored the soldier, and looked at Selah. They stared at each
other, neither speaking nor moving. Her grandmother’s dreads had
turned the color of iron, held back by a band at the nape of her
neck, but her face was still as broad and confident as ever. She’d
grown dark in the Florida sun, and wore a necklace of metal beads
around her throat. Selah met her gaze haughtily, refusing to look
away.

Finally, her grandmother pursed her lips and
shook her head. “My, how you’ve grown, child.” There was in those
words an infinite depth of sorrow and love that made Selah stiffen,
planted a frown on her face so deep it might have been etched with
acid. She opened her mouth to say a cutting retort but Mama B had
already turned to Christina. “I’m her grandmother. Where do I
sign?”

After the bus had driven away, Selah turned and
looked at her grandmother. Mama B regarded her with steady
patience, her leonine face set. A man came up behind her, broad
shouldered and half her grandmother’s age, hair nappy and eyes
speculative. He was strong, with big forearms, and Selah could
smell him from where she stood, watching the folks in the bus
shelters, a hand resting on a holstered pistol at his hip.

“Cholly, help Selah with her suitcase,” said
Mama B. “We’d best be going. No sense in waiting around for it to
get dark.”

Cholly stepped forward and reached out
hesitantly with one large hand. For a moment Selah gripped her
suitcase tighter, felt that relinquishing it would be tantamount to
accepting something, but then the practical side of her kicked in.
Let Cholly carry the damn thing.

“Pleasure to meet you,” he said, voice deep and
pleasant. He took the suitcase and held it easily in one hand.
Selah ignored him and crossed her arms over her chest. Just because
she was here didn’t mean she had to like it.

“Come on now,” said Mama B, turning and walking
toward the few cars parked off to the side. “Don’t
dilly-dally.”

A handful of people had stepped out of the
shadows of the shelters and were watching them. Selah did her best
to ignore their hungry gazes, but Cholly stared right back at them,
eyebrows raised, as if daring them to approach. After a moment the
strangers turned and returned to the shadows, muttering to
themselves, and Cholly nodded. “Vultures. If you’d of arrived here
by yourself, they’d’ve stripped you clean before you knew what was
happening.” He shook his head, and strode after Mama B.

Selah remained still—frustrated and furious over
her grandmother’s lack of interest in her. Where was the apology,
the explanations? The questions about Dad—any of it? Where was her
own cold disdain, the words she’d sworn she would speak? Instead,
she watched her grandmother’s broad back, let out a growl of
annoyance, and hurried to catch up.

The car was a red jeep, burned to rose by years
spent in the sun. Cholly threw the suitcase in the back and climbed
into the passenger seat as Mama B sat behind the wheel. Selah got
in behind, and met her grandmother’s eyes in the rearview mirror
for a brief flash before she gunned the engine, reversed, and drove
out of the parking lot.

The windows were down, but Mama B didn’t drive
fast enough to push the wind to a roar. They took the on-ramp back
onto I-95 and began to cruise down its length at a sedate thirty
miles an hour. There were abandoned cars pushed into the two far
left lanes, some of them clearly deserted on the spot by the
original owners, others looking like they had been rolled out of
the way later on.

“I thought people didn’t have cars in here,”
Selah said at last.

Mama B looked at her in the rearview mirror, and
then returned her eyes to the road. “Plenty of cars to be had.
Problem is getting your hands on some gas. Only a few stations are
stocked regularly, and those are downtown or over on South Beach.
You got to present an ID and be willing to pay in credits. Most
folks—most decent folks—have neither.”

“There’s an old station up round Midtown with
some gas left in one of the tanks,” said Cholly, turning around to
look at her. “I go by and tap it on the sly every few weeks. Most
people think it’s been drained dry already.” He turned back. “Soon
will be, way things are going. Don’t know what we’ll do then.”

Selah absorbed this, and looked out the window.
The sun was creeping toward the horizon. Everything was quiet but
for the rush of the wind past the windows. Occasionally, a truck or
car rushed past on the other side of I-95, heading for the border
before it got too late. Otherwise the city seemed deserted.

The silence in the car grew thick and
oppressive. Selah kept her arms locked tight across her chest. Her
outrage grew with every passing moment. Fine. After four years she
hadn’t known what to expect upon seeing her grandmother again, but
none of her imagined scenarios had featured indifference. It was as
if her grandmother were picking her up from the mall and driving
her home, not from the edge of civilization and into the heart of
hell.

I-95 curved slightly to the left, then back to
the right, and as they came up over a slight rise, Selah saw
distant skyscrapers come into view for the first time. They
glittered along the coast, glass gleaming as they reflected the
setting sun. That would be downtown, where banks and businesses had
once flourished and formed the heart of the Miami commercial
district. Now it was the heart of the vampires’ operation, where
supposedly those who served them lived and played and died. She
shuddered and hugged herself tighter. The glittering towers
represented death.

Mama B took Exit 4 off the interstate, and then
branched to the left on a raised highway toward the coast. They
were close to the Midtown area, with boxy buildings rising some ten
stories high from where they’d been built in the late ’60s. The
cars hadn’t been cleared off the elevated two lanes here, so Mama B
was forced to slow down and thread her way through. Shattered
headlights, doors left open, expensive sports cars and family
sedans, all abandoned where they stood. Selah spotted somebody
lying on the road between two cars, and then realized it was the
corpse of a man. She caught a flash of him as they drove past,
enough to realize that he was missing his head. Selah sat back and
swallowed hard, and then caught Mama B watching her in the rearview
mirror. Reflexively she wiped all emotion from her face and tried
to still her suddenly pounding pulse. The ramp off the highway onto
North Miami Avenue was clear, though, and so they curved round and
down and soon they were driving through a residential area.

Selah couldn’t take her eyes off the street.
She’d seen so many documentaries that it all looked vaguely
familiar: the cracked asphalt with weeds and small bushes growing
through, the broken windows, the vandalism, the trash piled high on
the pavement. Some buildings stood empty and dark, storefront
windows still showing wares that hadn’t been stolen five years
after they were deserted, while others were guttered ruins, burned
down to the ground. People sat listlessly on stoops, stood in loose
groups, watched them drive by from the occasional window. A pack of
mongrel dogs reluctantly parted for the jeep, their eyes gleaming
with hunger. Down a side street, Selah saw an old woman pushing a
shopping cart filled with blankets. She raised her Omni to take a
shot, and then lowered it without knowing why.

“Where … where are we going?”

“Home,” said Mama B, voice grim. “Or the closest
thing to it. Place called the Palisades. Used to be a wealthy condo
block. Now it’s where our community lives. Living together gives us
the illusion of safety.”

“Oh,” said Selah, and looked back out the
window. “That sounds cheerful.”

When the Peace Treaty had been signed with the
vampires, the news that both Miami and LA had been handed over had
immediately triggered a mass exodus, and hundreds of thousands had
fled before the Army could raise the Wall. Only those too poor, too
stubborn, or unable to leave due to any number of reasons had
remained behind during that fateful week after General Adams had
struck his deal with the devil. But still. Selah hadn’t expected
the city to feel this desolate. She’d thought the documentaries had
been exaggerated for effect.

She saw a Walgreens with a car parked savagely
through its front double doors. A police cruiser sat flipped on its
top, blackened by fire and gone to rust. A small crowd of kids
chased a soccer ball but stopped to watch them drive by, eyes
solemn, faces blank. The occasional stranger wandered down the
street as if lost, stumbling and vacant eyed. Shadows were already
lengthening across the street, dampening the day’s colors.
Something in the distance was burning, making the air acrid.

Mama B pulled the jeep up to the curb before a
ten-story building, a huge square of a condo with balconies
girdling it on each floor, once painted a festive combination of
yellows and oranges but now faded and drab. Sheets of steel covered
the front doors leading into the lobby, and hurricane shutters had
been bolted down over the windows. The building looked sad, harsh,
a homemade fortress against the night. It rose incongruously amidst
the blocks of rundown cottages and bungalows that crowded around
its flanks, and faced a rusted railroad track that was badly
overgrown.

Her grandmother gave the parking brake a hard
yank and looked back at where Selah sat. “Well, here we are. Home
sweet home.”

“This is where we live?” asked Selah.

Mama B lifted one eyebrow. “Would you rather be
on the street with those people we passed?”

Selah looked behind them, and then turned back.
“They don’t have places to stay?”

“Sure they do,” said Mama B. “But there’s a
world of difference between a community and squatting in an
abandoned house.”

Selah shook her head. “But—you’re saying they
choose to live like that? On the street?”

“In a way. Anybody who can’t see the point
behind rules and the value of sharing and sacrifice is going to end
up on the street eventually. Here at the Pallisades we’re working
to build something different. It might not be pretty to look at,
but it’s safe and full of good people. In a city like this, that’s
worth more than gold.”

“But what about the vampires? Don’t they worry
about getting attacked?”

“Honey, the vampires have people lining up
around the block to feed them and earn credits in the process.
These people out on the streets? They’re looking to just survive
another day. They’re thinking moment to moment. No vision, no hope,
nothing but basic appetites and instincts. They’re who you have to
worry about, not vampires. Now come on. Let’s get inside where it’s
safe.” And with that, she climbed out of the car. Cholly got out
too, and with his suitcase in one hand and gun in the other,
crossed the street and then turned to wait for her.

Selah looked up. She couldn’t see the sun behind
the buildings. Clouds wreathed the sky between the trees with great
swaths of crimson and soft gold. The sun was setting. Her heart
began to pound again, and with a curse she opened the door and
leaped to the curb, ran up to the doors, and slipped inside just as
Cholly stepped inside and closed them.