habit, Poe kissed the rosary cross Sister Ann had given her for luck even though it didn’t do squat to vamps.
She clamped a hand over her mouth.
She saw her startling reflection on the window of Goss’ tower and instead of a vampire killer, Poe looked more like a vampire chump. The bulky pack on her back gave her a Quasimodo bulge, and her wet and scarred face made her look depraved. She held the small Uzi at the ready and hurried into the green deco building.
Goss was as paranoid as Poe when it came to home safety. A year earlier, he had booby-trapped thirteen flights of stairs and rigged all but one elevator to be permanently disabled. In order to get it to open at the bottom floor, a code had to be entered correctly.
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“You’re a hundred times more paranoid than me, Goss,” she accused.
If incorrect numbers were punched, the elevator would open and deposit the invaders onto the thirteenth floor where Goss would be waiting for them, or climb back down the emergency staircase, booby-trapped with exploding holy water and shrapnel. Only the three knew which steps to avoid down the thirteen flights.
Poe had suffered dozens of nightmares about forgetting which stairs to dodge in the dark.
She stood in the lobby and entered the over-the-top sixteen-digit access code. The asthmatic wheeze of an old descending elevator filled the silence. Just in case, her finger touched the hammer of the Uzi. Her ears stood at attention and burned with fever.
“No fucking gits, please,” she prayed.
Her prayers were answered as the doors opened to an empty elevator car. She stepped in and blew out a shaky breath. Goss lived at the floor where the giant clock was perched. The elevator rose and opened to an almost cylindrical room tastefully decorated in a Danish Modern motif, where a sprinkling of pilfered Diebenkorn and Picasso paintings hung on the walls.
She had helped him pick out the Diebenkorn at the MOCA museum. Apparently none of the vampire looters thought much of such a plain painting. The strange feeling of nostalgia was so acute that Poe clutched the rosary around her neck with a ferocious grip.
“Mess with my friends and I’ll kill you slowly,”
she threatened the elevator.
Instant relief washed through Poe as she spied the dozing head of her friend, his giant feet draped over the couch arm. She was going to give him the biggest kiss ever. Then Poe realized that Penny and Legs were nowhere to be seen. They may have been a raggedy 56
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couple of canines, but they were excellent guard dogs.
Their barking and snarling usually alerted Goss to the elevator’s every movement.
The Uzi shook in her hands, but she prayed to her patron saints, Bruce, Ali, and Xena, for courage.
“G-G-Goss,” she called, butchering his name in stutterspeak. She cleared her throat and tried again, at the same time sweeping the room with her eyes. “Goss.
The boys are w-waiting downstairs. You’ll never believe how big and muscular they’ve become. They, um, only eat chocolate steroids these days.”
Her friend didn’t even stir. “They brought the flame throwers and bazookas.” She walked closer to the couch where her friend looked to be asleep. At least, she prayed that he was sleeping.
“They’ll be up here any–”
She gagged. Her friend’s face was ashen. His left arm hung lifeless to the floor. Blood trickled from the needle in his arm onto an overflowing makeshift container. A ballooning stain on the vanilla rug gave Poe pause. An unconscious Sister Ann lay where the coffee table used to be. Her mouth was open as if she couldn’t gulp in enough oxygen. Her habit was tainted with splotches of blood. Legs was dead, his head twisted in a strange angle. Penny, the dog she had cursed, was the only one of the group to acknowledge her with terrified eyes. She had two broken legs, and blood trickled from her mouth. The attackers had cut off her tongue.
Even before “Jesus!” came out of Poe’s mouth, an undernourished halfdead with Gatorade strength fell from the ceiling, landing feet first between her unconscious friends. The ceiling dweller hissed, showing a mouthful of missing teeth but for two yellow fangs. From the kitchen area came two gold 57
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encrusted leeches carrying machetes and guns. Another emerged from behind the powder blue curtains.
“Don’t even think about it, little chick. You’re outnumbered,” the scrawny, pockmarked halfhead with a tan warned. Who ever said vampires were attractive?