Teeth: Vampire Tales

The List of Definite Endings by KAARON WARREN

Sometimes partying felt like punishment. Claudia hated large groups of people, vampires included. They had secret jokes she didn’t get, and the conversation always moved too fast for her.

She liked to be with one person, or two. Talking about life and the future. About the past. She met people who’d seen history being made and were alive to talk about it. This was interesting to her. Not empty nights of dancing, laughing, feasting, sex. Perhaps she was too earnest, that was the problem. The rest of them were without care or thought. She wished she could be that way, but there was too much left of her soft mortal self.

Her boyfriend, Joel, waved his hand in front of her face. “Aren’t you hungry? Let’s go feast.” He poked her. “Stop dreaming. Let’s go party. The night’s coming in and you’re sitting around like you don’t wanna get fed.”

She felt a deep gnawing in her stomach. “Yes, I’m hungry. Of course I’m hungry. But I don’t feel like eating in a group.”

Joel rolled his eyes. “You bore me. Do you realize that? Bored bored bored.”

“Well, I’m bored with all this, too. Don’t you get sick of it? The relentlessness? Don’t you get tired of always being nineteen? Don’t you want to know what it’s like to be thirty? Forty?”

Claudia had been turned in 1942, three weeks before her final high school exams, something she’d always regretted. She’d studied hard, really hard, and she knew her stuff. She could write an essay on each of Henry VIII’s wives, and on child mortality rates around the world, and on the voting systems of almost any country you could name. They didn’t talk about the war in class. Their teachers said the facts changed too quickly and that they would have to wait and see. If the Germans won, then the history books would all have to be changed. Everybody knew that.

She was the first girl in her family to make it that far, one of only five girls finishing high school. Most of her friends were working in the shops, and some had even signed up as nurses, out saving the lives of brave soldiers. Finding brave, damaged husbands. Some days Claudia envied this ordinary life, others she knew she was due much more.

Her family was wealthy, always had been. It was because of shoes; people always needed shoes. Her father traveled a lot with the family shoe business, though Claudia knew there was more to it than that. He came back exhausted from his sales trips, often injured. Always his fingers covered with cuts and splinters, his eyes bruised. Scratches on his arms. While she studied, her mother fed her in a constant, perfectly timed stream of healthy and unhealthy snacks. Claudia knew the rest of the family went without so that she would have enough food to study on. A rare and beautiful apple. Thick slices of bread with butter and raspberry jam. Sometimes a piece of cake, if the neighbors pooled their resources. Claudia knew she did better than most.

Once her mother cooked a roast chicken and she put garlic all over it. Buttery garlic sauce to pour over the meat and the potatoes, fat slices of bread on the side.

This was the food she remembered now, when she thought about her past life. She hadn’t tasted garlic for close to seventy years, not in vegetable form, although sometimes the blood she drank was flavored with it. She liked that.

Early on she’d tried dead blood. It made her sick and weak for days. Most vampires don’t like to be around dead bodies. The smell turns them off — the waste of all that good, warm blood gone cold.

It was worth a try, though. Her vampire friends (all moved on, traveling the world) thought she was crazy, and any vampire she’d told since did as well. But every time she killed someone living, the memory of her parents lessened. She could almost feel it; a memory breaking loose and being dissolved by the foreign blood in her veins. She didn’t want to forget her parents, killed by the same vampires who’d turned her. She’d begged those monsters to turn her parents as well. Not kill them.

“We don’t want any old vampires,” they’d told Claudia. “No old rules, no tired old vampires. You need to be young to be one of us.” Claudia thought of her dad and the thousand cuts inflicted on him by the vampires. A father’s secret life as a vampire hunter come back to haunt him. He was almost dead when they dragged Claudia in and turned her in front of him. The last thing he saw was his daughter’s vampire eyes.

So all she had left of her parents was the memories of them, and when she could do it with no one watching, she drank the dead blood and put up with the weakness and nausea, for the sake of keeping memory.

Joel jumped onto the couch and backflipped off it, narrowly missing the coffee table. “Can a forty-year-old do that? You can’t seriously want to get old.”

“I don’t want to get old. But I do get tired of this stuff. This life. I’ve been doing it for seventy years. If they’d waited till I was twenty-one, at least. Twenty-one is a much easier age than nineteen. I could have found real jobs.”

“Twenty-one is old,” Joel said. “Who wants to be old? You might as well be, though. You’re sad and boring. Both things.” He walked away, as so many did. She’d see him around, but they were done with a relationship.

She knew that human boys were like that as well, sudden in their decisions, uncaring about softening the blow. But they grew up, became men. Learned how to care, be thoughtful. She’d watched it in Ken; seen him learn to love his wife, Sonia, and his children. All of them cared about one another and many other things.

She’d first met Ken fifty years earlier. She was out hunting with a group (she’d been a vampire twenty years, and the group constantly changed but essentially stayed the same), and they’d targeted a young, juicy man, sitting alone in a bar. Stools on either side of him empty, but the rest of the room full.

“You go,” one of the gang had insisted to Claudia. “You haven’t pulled one for a while.” Claudia hated this, the seduction of a victim. She hated the way they all fed off the same veins, the same blood. But she knew she had to join in or they might tear her apart.

She’d sat down by the lonely man. He’d looked around, as if surprised. “Is it okay if I sit here?” she’d asked.

He’d nodded. Speechless, she thought, at the idea that someone was talking to him. She felt terrible pity for him, glad his life was almost over.

She ordered a Coca-Cola; she didn’t want the barman asking for ID. Even in the ’60s they didn’t like letting minors get drunk.

“Seems quiet tonight,” she said. She was really bad at this. “You meeting anyone?” She had to find out if anyone would miss him for a while.

“No. No. Just came out because the apartment gets too quiet sometimes. So what’s your name? I’m Ken.”

“Claudia.” She didn’t want to know his name. “So you live alone?”

He didn’t answer.

“What do you do, then?”

“Work in the coroner’s office.”

“With dead bodies?”

“Yes, with dead bodies.” He said it angrily, as if ready for what would come next. It must have happened many times. People walking away in disgust.

“Cool,” she said. “Do you get to touch them?”

Ken took a sip of his beer. Didn’t speak.

“Do you touch the dead bodies?” Claudia asked again. It seemed important.

“Yeah, I touch them. I mostly do paperwork, though. Lists and things.”

“Oh.”

“But I do get to touch them. Have you ever touched one?” She could see him getting excited, thinking he might have found the right girl.

“I have.” Then something he said sparked. “What sort of lists do you mean?”

“I’m not supposed to talk about it. People aren’t supposed to know.”

She leaned closer. Across the room, the vampires were getting impatient, bored with her. Good. Let them find their own victim. “What sort of lists?”

“We keep a list of the terminally ill. Just so we can be forewarned. So the coroner can plan ahead. But people think it sounds bad, so we don’t really talk about it.”

She felt something like excitement growing.

“People on the list are going to die, no doubt? They are definitely going to die?”

“There’s little doubt, according to their doctors.”

She liked him for not saying, “We’re all going to die.”

“Can we go see some dead bodies?” she said. “I’d like that.”

She took his hand and led him past the vampire table on the way, and she shook her head at them, bent over to her boyfriend of the time (what was his name? She could barely remember his face), and whispered, “Leave this guy. Lives with his mother. Too much trouble.”

“Where are you going then?” her boyfriend asked. She knew he didn’t care.

“I’ll be back. Eat without me.”

The group of them physically turned their backs on her, but she didn’t care. She was used to that.

That was how she got the first list of the terminally ill. It was around the time that Adolf Eichmann was hanged for war crimes, and death was a focus in the minds of many. War was coming again, and yet each death was worth grieving, each life was worth remembering.

The first person from the list she killed was a woman in her forties. Claudia had never seen anyone in so much pain, with so much suffering around her. Daily she begged to die. Daily.

As Claudia took her, she said, “Thank you.”

There was no loss of memory as Claudia drank. Her parents remained clear.

Ken brought her updated versions of the list when she asked for them, never questioning what she wanted them for. Just her attention was enough. Their friendship grew even when he realized there was something up with her. He accepted it completely. They saw each other through life’s events, though more so for Ken than for her. She helped him to find Sonia, and to keep her. She had never met Sonia. It was best that way. But without Claudia, Ken would never have had the confidence to make a family life. He saw her through dozens of boyfriends, mostly vampires, and disapproved of them all.

At first when she and Ken were seen together, people mistook them for brother and sister. Then father and daughter. These days it was more like grandfather and granddaughter.

He had moved beyond the morgue to other jobs, but she had learned much in her eighty years and could hack into the computers for her lists whenever she needed to.

With the thought of Joel a dull ache and Ken very much on her mind, Claudia walked down to the seawall, enjoying the wind on her face and the smell of the salt. Joel said she didn’t really feel anything except for hunger, the sensation only a memory of what was. “You have a very good memory,” he said as an insult.

The seawall was high and the drop on the other side long. Teenagers would tightrope the wall, and even though it was as thick as a footpath, they teetered nervously.

Claudia walked slowly in the early-evening light. She liked this time, when there was enough natural light to see by. She liked the night falling, darkness growing. Liked the way it made her focus.

She sat on the wall, her feet dangling over. Pulling out her notebook, she checked her timetable. Joel didn’t know about this; none of them did. They already thought she was boring. Imagine what they’d think if they knew she had a list of future food sources, with their usual movements, phone numbers, all of it. She didn’t need notes to find her meal tonight, though. She knew where he’d be. Her notes were a simple comfort, this time, giving her a sense of control.

Darkness came down, and it seemed half the streetlights didn’t work. Sea spray meant the air was misty.

Up ahead, she saw someone on the wall, arms spread. There was no audience, so not a teenager showing bravado. She walked closer, saw it was Ken, his face wet.

He did not hear her approach. Tears. He was crying, passionately, as if he were emptying himself out.

“Ken?” she said. She’d been tracking him without his knowledge for six weeks now, knew his movements. After all these years of friendship, this was an odd intimacy. Watching this old man when he thought he was alone revealed nothing she didn’t know, though. He was a good, kind man who picked his nose.

Every morning he would leave the house and go to sit by the seawall, tempting himself until evening drew him home.

Looking at him, she thought, He’s almost the same age as I am. He remembers what I remember. The music, the movies. But he got old and I didn’t. Moments like that made her glad to be a vampire. She was glad to be living young in the twenty-first century, to have enjoyed the changes in the world as a young person.

“Ken,” she said again.

He turned to her voice. “Do you think I’d die if I jumped or just hurt myself?”

She climbed onto the wall, holding on tight to the edge. Looked over. “You’d hurt yourself. I guess you’d drown if you kept your face down.”

He sat slumped beside her. He had an odd smell, something not quite right.

It wasn’t a dead smell, not yet.

Ken, still balanced on the seawall, bent forward. “Am I on your list now?”

“Do you want me to call Sonia? The kids?” Claudia said. She knew what his answer would be.

“That wouldn’t do any good. She’d only come get me.”

Claudia squinted at him. “You don’t want her to?”

“No. No, I don’t. I don’t want her to see me again. It’s too hard for her.”

His voice was strained, and Claudia realized he was in great pain. “Are you. all right?” He tilted his head and looked at her properly. “You’ve always been kind.”

“My mum was kind. I guess it rubbed off.”

“Never lose that,” Ken said. “I wish I’d been kinder to everyone. Friends and strangers.”

Claudia didn’t say “It’s never too late,” because she could hear that it was.

“What’s wrong with you?” she said, vampire direct. She knew this answer as well, but he needed to say it. It was part of the process.

“Sick. Very sick. Pain ahead and long-drawn-out suffering for my kids. No kid should see a parent suffer. You shouldn’t have to see it.”

“What about the hospital? Can’t they help?”

“With the pain. But what’s the point? I want to pass quietly, peacefully, in control. Why can’t I have that?”

Claudia watched him for a while, then gazed out to sea. “Have you said good-bye to everyone? Tied it all up? Dying with a loose end is no good.”

He looked surprised. “Thanks. For listening, not trying to convince me.” His voice was tight, so full of pain Claudia could almost feel it. “I’ve tied it all up. I say good-bye, I love you, every day just in case. I’ve left special gifts for the grandchildren and messages for the great-grandchildren. I’ve apologized to people. It’s sorted. But I just can’t. ” He stopped, bent over, clutching his ears. “I’m too gutless to do what I need to do.”

Claudia felt her teeth tingle. “I can help,” she whispered. She snarled gently, then said it louder. “I can help.”

He turned, saw her teeth.

“The list? This is what you use the list for?”

She nodded. “I’ll be gentle,” she said, and she bent forward and drank deeply from the beautiful, pulsing vein in his neck. Drank till she was done, till he was; then she sat him on the ground, propped against the wall, and called an ambulance. She didn’t want him robbed, or his body stolen or damaged. His wife and kids needed to know quickly, to see him while he still looked close to life.

She watched from across the street until the ambulance arrived; then she walked home, feeling satisfied in her stomach and in the heart all the others assured her she didn’t have.