Dracula in Love by John Shirley

Author:John Shirley [Shirley, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Night Shade Books
Published: 2015-01-15T16:00:00+00:00

-6-

San Francisco. Chinatown; 1:00 a.m.

Dracula wore army fatigues beneath his trench coat. His mirror sunglasses made him an anomaly in the city night. Toltin, at his side, wore a black leather jacket and black knit cap.

It was a warm Saturday night, and there were still tourists and revelers walking the neon-burnished street. The club and restaurant signs were Chinese ideograms, luminously enigmatic. In the perspective of distance the severe lineaments of the street converged in a patina of bright scales: refraction of neon lights, headlights, streetlights, and metal; glints diffused through a cloudy lens of cigarette smoke, steam from manholes, and carbon monoxide.

The warm breeze mixed odors of cooked meat and garbage. The city was unnaturally vivid in Dracula’s wound-sensitive eyes. Its sounds were unnaturally vivid in his ears—boys whistling, pistons gnashing, gears clashing. Too loud, too loud, loud as the unsounded inner scream of a gagged rape victim. Dracula ground his teeth. He wanted to explode in retaliatory rage and drown the city noises with the screaming of his victims. He wanted to kill the source of the cacophony and leave the city quiet as a graveyard.

But boyish laughter echoed to them from the left. Dracula turned that way, on to a tenebrous side street, where garbage was piled on the sidewalk and against the backdoors of Chinese groceries, reeking of fish and vegetables gone bad.

“What are we hunting tonight, my Lord?” Toltin asked in a whisper.

“Shut up,” Dracula commanded briskly, pausing near an alleyway. “Listen...”

Voices from within the alley. “I don’t care, I want some action,” someone said. A boy’s voice.

“This izuh wrong time, man!” said a girl. “We go looking for the Culters tonight, we go up against the cops and a fight against them ain’t fair; they got guns and cars—”

“Fuck the cops. They come around every two weeks. Don’t mean nothin’ and they won’t do nothin’.”

“I dunno. Shit, maybe she’s right,” came a third voice. “Um, uh—huh!—we could uh give it maybe a couple weeks, man, till the fuckers, y’know, cool off.”

Dracula motioned for Toltin to conceal himself in a doorway on the opposite side of the street. Silently and swiftly, Toltin obeyed.

Dracula began to climb the brick cornice of the four-story apartment building edging the alley. Where there were no handholds he sunk his metal-hard fingers into the mortar, by strength of limb—clawing his way up. Swiftly and liquidly as a cat climbing a tree to escape a dog, Dracula was at the roof—in forty seconds.

He pulled himself over and crept along the tar, between neck-like tin chimneys, to the far edge. He looked down, into the alley.

Six teenage Chinese boys were there, arguing in harsh whispers. A girl stood to one side. Like the others, she wore a denim jacket with a dragon insignia sewn on the back.

“I didn’t join this club to go bowling, man. What the fuck’s it mean to be a Dragon if we don’t—”

“It means you do what I say,” said the tallest boy. “Long as I’m prez, mothuhfuckuh.”

“Hey, look, we can find something to do besides cut the Culters tonight,” said the girl.

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