The blood-splattered farce began as I was painting my toenails, about to complete the old fly-to-Saturn, come back as your own granddaughter trick. Okay, the flying to Saturn part was new, but you know the drill: travel as far as you can, out where record-keeping gets shaky, bring forged identity chip, dump previous identity chip in the nearest fusion reactor. So clean, so fool-proof.
I digress. Toenails. We were on our way back to Earth. The ship had done its little turn so the gravity came from deceleration instead of acceleration, and I was considering who I’d have my celebratory one-night stand with. (I don’t flirt until the last night of a trip. It’s safer.)
The comforting thrum of the engines simply stopped, sharp as throwing a switch, and I and my nail polish floated off the bedspread.
I’d felt that before. I had bigger problems than getting nail polish out of my hair. I pushed off to my cabin door in pure panic. It was locked. Every hatch had sealed with a synchronized bang when the engines stopped.
Another bad sign: the voice that came over the speaker system was not the usual baritone of the ship’s purser but a nervous soprano. “This, uh, this is the captain?” She cleared her throat. “Pirates are cleaning out the cargo hold, but we’ll be on our way, shortly. Just sit tight and don’t antagonize anyone who might decide to, well, kill us all. Uh… yeah. We’ll release lockdown when they leave, okay? If you’re in the café or …” her voice faded, said, “crap, the swimming pool,” and cut out.
The perks of being a vampire – strength and speed – are useless when your enemy attacks from afar. Like most everyone does, these days.
Most of my blood was in the cargo hold, in a state-of-the-art suspension chamber to keep it fresh. I only kept a few days’ supply in my cabin. Usually. I had been planning on topping up the stash after my nails were done, so I only had one pint left. This was the worst possible scenario. I need a pint a day to stay fresh-looking, and quite frankly, I over-eat when I’m anxious.
The super-strength thing coupled with panic did a nice job on the locked door. I paused to fuss at the twisted mess I’d made of it, but I could worry about explaining after I had my blood. Something, something, metal fatigue?
The space liner had four first-class cabins like mine in this module, then a larger business-class module with compact berths which I had to go through to get anywhere else on the ship. Witnesses to any feats of extra-human strength. Sometimes it does not pay to go bougie.
I was more careful with the inter-module bulkhead hatch, but the lock tumblers made such a noise snapping, worse than gunfire. I waited, not hearing a horde coming for me, and assumed the cheaper passengers had been sealed in their berths like I had been in my room.
Nope. They were all floating over their bunks and into the hallway, staring at me as I rolled the bulkhead open.
“Wow,” I said, “Did you hear that? I mean, dang, do they always sound like that?” I pushed away from the door, shaking my head. “Uh… so I’m just … picking locks. Gonna try to see what’s going on. Probably dumb of me.” I swam past people, trying not to make eye contact.
A plump middle-aged woman followed me through the cabin—short, blandly coiffed hair, holding a travel bag that bobbed after her like a pet. She had a very “I’m about to ask for the manager” look about her. She’d bothered me before, trying to make small talk in the café. Karen-something? NOT on the one-night-stand list.
I got to the door on the far end and realized I couldn’t pretend to pick a lock without a lock pick. Centuries of wisdom and experience on display here. I palmed a spork floating above a dinner tray.
Karen kept trying to look over my shoulder as I fiddled unconvincingly with the spork. “Is that how you got the other door? Show me how to do it.”
“No. You’ll turn to a life of crime.” I tried to get a firm grip on the lock as I had with the inter-module hatch, without looking like that was what I was doing.
“Once you get through there, it’s at least two more bulkheads to get to control. You’ll want help.”
“Thanks, but I’ve got it.”
Karen made an annoyed hum. “Do you have a plan? Shouldn’t we simply wait until the pirates leave?”
I wished she was as vapid as I initially judged her to be. I snapped the tumblers and pushed the bulkhead open, accidentally breaking my spork in the process.
Karen crowded ahead of me into the next compartment. Fine, that was fine. I knew I needed to go through the bulkhead on the left to get to the cargo hold. The hatch had a different design but should be able to be broken in the same way. A door is a door, right? I grabbed hold of the lock mechanism, and…
It didn’t feel like there were any parts in it to break? Nothing budged. I tried hard enough that my fingers mashed little dents into the exterior mechanism. Nothing. I let go.
Karen had her arms crossed, floating above me like a judgmental balloon. “That’s a pressure hatch. Also, you forgot your spork.”
Whatever a pressure hatch was, it was unfairly stubborn against vampire strength. I went back to look at the Emergency Evacuation map on the inside of the bulkhead for the business-class compartment. There had to be a way around the Awful Impossible Door.
Awful Impossible Door was marked in red on the map, as were a few others, all in a line on the floor plan, with a note that they would be unopenable in a lockdown event to protect the crew. How nice for the crew. I scanned the map for anything helpful to paying customers.
There were the emergency evacuation airlocks, one was right there in business-class, but, ugh, freezing, destroying void wasn’t a good look on me. The other hatch in led to an un-secured area. It didn’t say what it was, but the layout on the map made me think it was the laundry.
My fellow passengers gathered around, watching like I was going to save them all. I coughed. “Well, how long is this pirating going to take, really? Maybe we should just wait it out.”
A taller man clinging to a ceiling strap asked, “What if what they’re after is us, though?”
That thought hit the room like gasoline on a fire. Everyone shrank tighter to whatever they were holding onto and started talking at once. “He’s right.” “We don’t have a lot of cargo.” “Why attack a liner for cargo?”
Commercial colonies, the mines for ice, the mines for diamonds, they were notorious for killing off their workforce as fast as they could get them, so they got replacements in… creative ways. Like from pirates who stole a nice canister full of people.
I looked around at the businesspeople, the vacationers. I assured myself we were a shitty choice for a labor pool. “It hasn’t been that long. Uh… I’m going back to my cabin.”
Someone grabbed my ankle. “Wait. You need to open the door to the cafe. We need to eat.”
I kicked free and went to my room, where I sucked down my last blood bag in anxiety-induced desperation. Then I felt guilty about it, wrapped myself up in a blanket and took a nap.
When I woke up, I was still floating, and annoyingly pressed up against the air vent near my ceiling. The air wasn’t circulating, but I could smell human flop-sweat, thick like stew. My stomach growled. I opened the door to the cheap berths.
Karen was there, waiting for me, one hand overhead holding her in place. “So… pirates.”
“Sounds picturesque, doesn’t it?” I pushed away from her, back into my room.
She followed, uninvited. (That’s so unfair.) “Have you encountered them before?”
“No.”
She crossed her arms, laying back on the air like we were gonna have a good long talk. “I was hoping you were special forces or a marshal or something. We need to make contingency plans.”
“For what? These are people willing to risk the big black swimming pool for a questionable payoff. In short, desperate fuckups.” There’s a metaphor there for vampires, somewhere, but let’s not examine it too closely. “They’ll get what they need and go away. I just wish they’d hurry up.”
“Right? This is worse than the line waiting at Disneyland,” she said.
People used to say that all the time, about a hundred years ago. I frowned at her. “What’s that?”
“Just a line I heard in an old movie.” She fussed with her coiffure. It was so short and gelled it hadn’t moved. “I know I should be scared out of my mind, but mostly I’m just bored.”
One of the silly things about being a vampire is that the more interesting a person is, the more you want to eat them. This has a negative impact over time. Still, I added her to my dining options in the plans I was juggling in my mind. “They don’t tell you that about life-threatening situations,” I said. “I mean, we could talk about sports, but that might feel frivolous.”
“I don’t know, playoffs can be life or death. Do you like hockey?”
No one, as near as I can tell, had played hockey professionally in twenty years. I squinted at her. “I get the feeling someone’s fishing for something.”
She checked my hatch was sealed and then turned to me with a serious frown. She lowered her voice. “Okay, look – I usually have more time to do this and I can be subtle, but we’re locked in here without our baggage which means it’s only a matter of time before you start putting people on your menu.”
Fuck. How long had she been tailing me? This lady was good. “Um. I mean. I don’t—”
“Don’t waste time denying you’re a vampire, we—”
There was a shudder. The engines starting again.
We both startled, and looked for a long time at the floor, the direction the sound came from. I watched Karen’s joy fade to relief and then to worry. Where was the announcement from the captain saying things were okay, now? Where was the acceleration to match G?
I felt myself, then, being pulled up… to the ceiling.
Karen held up a finger. “We’ll return to this.” She kicked hard and out the door.
I felt like she’d yanked the deck plates from under me and hit me with them. I followed her back to the main passenger cabin.
The scent of panic was so powerful my vision blurred. Everyone was touching the ceiling now. The pull wasn’t strong, but it was clear, we were not going the direction we had been, and the people driving didn’t care if we could walk. Karen was leading a discussion and I wanted to hear it, but I couldn’t stop eying up the people as food. Morality vanishes pretty fast when you’re starving. Who could I slip away with unnoticed? Where could we be undisturbed? I’m not a bad looking woman so anyone attracted to women would be a good start.
Of course, once you bite one person, the odds are good they’ll tell someone, and if you kill them, well, then you have the whole hide-the-body problem, and it’s a ticking clock until the pitchforks. Even if I could somehow deal with all thirty-odd of the other passengers, what would the slave-pirates do when they opened up a sealed box to find one me and a stack of bodies?
The reminder that eating people would have repercussions helped me get a hold on myself. I lifted the collar of my shirt and rubbed it on my nose to put my own scent over the mouthwatering miasma.
Karen grabbed my arm and dragged me after her, one-arm crawling on the ceiling out to the little vestibule compartment where my lock-breaking spree had ended.
“What are you doing?” I only just kept from using too much strength to pull my arm from her grip.
She muscled close to me, her voice low and urgent. “You and I are having a heart-to-heart because you confessed to me that you are a claustrophobic on the verge of a panic attack.”
“Huh?”
She huffed. “Shut up and stay close so they don’t hear us plan.”
“What are you? Everything you pretended to guess? Special forces? A marshal?” She scowled, silently. I cleared my throat. “You have a plan?”
“Only the most obvious one.”
“I’m sorry – I missed anything obvious other than eating you before you tell them all I’m a vampire.”
She rolled her eyes. So much for the fear of me. “Eat the pirates. Be a hero and get an all-you-can-eat buffet.”
That was brilliant. Eating the pirates would help me with the whole not-eating-passengers plan. Then my stupid brain caught up and pissed on my hopes. “Problem. We can’t get to the crew area, which is where the pirates are.”
Her eyes slid to the emergency exit airlock.
“Hell no,” I said. “Been there, done that, got the freezer-burn.” My first trip to space and back was when I learned my “don’t snack on the crew” rule.
Karen’s demeanor shifted seamlessly to stone cold. She pulled a wooden stake partway out of her hip pocket. “Take my offer or I end you to save the rest of us.”
Wood. In space. I did my best to look unafraid and unimpressed. I channeled teenage sarcasm. “Isn’t vampire hunting an outdated sport?”
“Aren’t you outdated?” she replied. “Deal or no deal?”
Some of my erstwhile snacks were peering around the bulkhead, eyeballing us with worried and confused expressions. I nuzzled close to her ear. “Unlike you, I only have to wait this out. Slavers won’t hold me for long.”
I didn’t really believe that, so it was totally unfair that she replied, “You don’t really believe that.”
No. They’d shoot first and stake after. I pouted. “It took months for my eyes to grow back last time.”
“Wow you’re uptight. I had heard that vampires don’t use the bathroom.”
“Why do people think that? We eat blood, with our mouths, a visible part of the digestive—” Karen was smirking at me like I was cute. I pushed away from her, got some professional distance back. “Remember who has preternatural abilities, here.”
“You really want a fight?” She made it sound like a come-on.
“I can take you.”
Her chuckle was not confidence inspiring. “Think you can make it wherever the slavers are going on dead blood?”
She was annoyingly making sense, and I could see by her smile she knew she had me. I groaned. “It took months,” I repeated. “And you have no idea how much that itches.”
She touched her lips to my temple. “Spandex,” she said.
“What? What are you talking a–”
But she was already moving toward the main compartment. “Everyone? Can I have your attention? This young woman has volunteered to try to get to the control room. She can make it, but we need some way of wrapping her exposed skin in a tight material to protect it against the vacuum. We need all your spandex.”
“Wait, I never said…”
But that was all the word I got in edgewise. Suddenly I was in a capsule full of civic responders. Everyone stripped, and a collection was made of all the undergarments, some of which were spacesuit-liners, the most practical thing to wear in space. Someone had a helmet-liner, even, to cover half a head, and Karen-the-Vampire-Slayer had a glue gun in her tote.
“I don’t go anywhere without it. This isn’t even the weirdest thing I’ve used it for,” she said, using the heating element to melt together sections of polymer-impregnated cloth.
The bustle and pressure of social movement swept me along like a wind-tunnel. I wondered if I wasn’t safer leaving the ship after all. I knew all the various ways to survive decompression – you didn’t go through that once and stop reading up about it – and wrapping in spandex was on the list.
The other passengers bound my eyes tight with a cloth before putting the spandex gimp-suit on me.
“Wait,” I grabbed Karen. “I’m not going out there blind. I need eyes.”
“No one’s eyes could withstand—HEY!”
The “hey” was for how I was feeling her up, digging through her pockets. There was the stake, a tube that was probably Chapstick… aha. I held up something small and disk-like. “What are the odds this is a spy camera, Ms. Suspicious?”
She snatched it from my hand. “Yes, you’re very smart.” I felt her taping it to my forehead. Then, with a curse, she shoved something small and hard into my ear. “Hold to the right side of the airlock when it opens. There’s a handhold opposite the interior control panel. From there, you’ll be going perpendicular on handholds for four meters. You should feel an indent–”
“If I get stuck floating in vacuum, I will find a way to kill your every living relative,” I said.
She patted my shoulder. “You won’t.”
“How will I even get into the command module?”
She pressed the plastic tube into my hand. “Emergency override signal. Works on all external airlocks. Congratulations, you guessed it; I’m a marshal. Now repeat the instructions back.”
It was a lot to remember, her minute description of how to get from here to there, and I was so focused on that it wasn’t until the air-lock door closed behind me that I realized all this could be a plan to get the vampire out of the picture. The “override” could really be a Chapstick tube. Last time had been before anyone had any reason to lock an airlock from the outside. Would the covering of spandex be enough to protect me if I was on the sun-side of the ship?
Startled by that thought, I almost missed grabbing on to the handhold when the doors opened.
Even swaddled up like a mummy, the cold hurt, and my lungs burned. I’d made sure to expel all my air well before entering the airlock, but there’s always a little bit you forget, bursting out of you like a hand reached in and yanked it. My left ear popped like a firecracker. The right had the bud in it, which must have protected it, but it burned like a coal.
Basically, being in the void felt like swimming through hot lava. Or ice water. Or… okay, I’ll never come up with a good analogy. Try it yourself if you’re so curious.
I fumbled blindly with my thickly swaddled hands against the hull. The texture of scraping without the sound felt like the physical manifestation of nails on chalkboard. This was hell. A lonely hell.
My right ear crackled. “Could you possibly move faster than the heat death of the universe?”
I was stupidly grateful for the sound of stupid Karen’s sarcasm. Handhold, handhold. She huffed, “Thank Christ, I was staring at that bolt for an age.”
Better than what I was staring at, I mouthed airlessly. Now I had a new torture, the inability to make snappy comebacks.
“You’re doing great. Almost to the indent.”
I was not grateful, I told myself, gratefully, as my fingers slid into the indent. “That’s it. Keep going. You can grip that lip all the way to the airlock.”
“Lip” was a gross exaggeration for the faint depression I could barely keep my cramping fingers inside. Still, I was able to slide along it, in pure agony as Karen fed me a countdown, “One more meter. Half a meter. That’s it.”
I fumbled the stupid emergency override tube. I could barely feel it. Imagine your life depending on holding on to your Chapstick with frostbitten hands, in a windstorm. Of course, it tumbled out of my grip. I flailed uselessly, almost letting go of the ship. If I’d had a heart, it would have stopped.
“You’re fine! It read! It read! Stop, go forward!”
The wall was moving against me, I groped blindly for the edge, and around it, the reassuring feel of concave instead of convex wall… it closed behind me, and the all-over pain switched flavors, like going from mint to chili, and I knew that the pressure was returning. Pins and needles. My whole body felt like a limb whose circulation just returned. I know vampires don’t have circulation. Work with me.
I was blind. The returning pressure slammed into my good ear, leaving me swaddled in thrumming not-sound. The radio buzzed arrhythmically, but hell if I could tell what Karen was saying anymore.
My nose, however, still worked, it smelled meat, and something under my skin reacted to body heat approaching.
Someone unwashed and skinny. I didn’t even know what limb I was biting. Hot, scrumptious blood, mixed with cotton and plastic and dripping down my chin. It was an arm. You get your sense of anatomy back pretty quick.
I crawled up to neck and dug in for more. Hot, gushing, fresh from the font. Luscious. I lost track of everything else, didn’t feel myself move, didn’t know where the next person came from, the next warm, squirming sack of food. I noticed getting stabbed in the back, but I didn’t much care. It wasn’t wood.
By the third person, my hearing was back – nothing speeds up healing like a healthy diet. The first thing I heard was screaming, followed by “… turn left. To your left. You seriously still can’t hear me? Use your eyes! That one’s not moving anymore, turn left.”
Oh, right, I thought, and turned left. I tore the blindfold off and saw slightly less dark blurriness. I blinked hard, things fuzzing into coherence, rather like my thoughts.
The vampire hunter spoke more calmly. “That’s it. More. Now straight. He’s in front of you.”
With her help and the visual acuity of a hung-over bat, I got the next pirate and drained him with leisurely joy. “Good. Good vampire. That’s the last one.” Condescending, but I was too warm and full to mind. I’d curl up and purr in Karen’s lap at this point.
“You’re doing great. Feel along the control panel in front of you – don’t press anything! There should be a keyboard. Can you touch-type?”
Another blink and squint, and I could make out the outlines of the keyboard, my hand, black fabric glistening, on top of it. I bit the pesky gloves off and found the home row. “Can I touch-type? Bitch, please. Can humans bleed?”
“It talks! Let me know when you’re ready.”
I followed her instructions, typing commands I definitely didn’t understand. Spaceship flying was never a skill I thought to get. I must have done it good enough because I felt the wonderful pull of the-floor-is-the-floor-again.
“That should just about—”
Someone in a space suit tackled me, all clumsy over-sized blue, and I had to tear through a lot of thick, disgusting-tasting fabric to get at the gooey center.
I dropped the corpse and picked fuzz from my teeth. My eyesight was clearing. The room was smaller than I had thought.
“Okay, beautiful. The emergency locks are off the bulkheads. All full?”
“Never,” I said, and burped.
“Too bad. I’m coming into the room and if you snap at me, I will kill you. That last one was a crewman, by the way.”
Morality was slowly returning, like warm syrup. “Oops.”
“Oops, she says, and you wonder why I hunt your kind.” I heard a hatch open but didn’t trust myself to turn to face it. Then she was next to me, touching me. “Let’s get this blood cleaned up. I told the others you were special forces. That story isn’t going to fly with the massive trail from your mouth.”
“Sure.” I was light-headed, soaking full, and exhausted; I’d have said “sure” to anything.
She deftly stripped me of my mangled pieces of underwear. In hindsight, it would have been a good time for her to stick a piece of wood through me, but I guess she felt grateful or something, because she gave me a bathrobe to put on while she bustled around, flipping switches and talking to someone else.
Eventually, she tugged me like a toddler to my bed, where I fell into the deepest sleep while she did fate knows what to explain it all.
I was genuinely surprised to wake up not-ashes, though not surprised to find Karen there, a wooden stake resting on her stomach as she sat against my headboard, reading.
I propped my head on my hand. “Can this be one of those ‘start of a beautiful friendship’ things?”
She picked up and waggled the stake without taking her eyes off her book. “Oh, you’re not getting rid of me.”
I plucked the stake from her fingers. When she scowled, I kissed her fingers and then plucked away the book. “I think it’s time for my customary one-night stand the last night of the trip.”
“We have four days left.”
In my best Dracula voice, I purred, “It is always night in space.”
She rolled her eyes, but she kissed back. Beautiful friendship unlocked, with benefits.
Fiasco and all, it was my best trip to space.
