with her knee. At several attempts later, she finally 8
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succeeded in slicing off the remaining fingers of his right hand as well. His oozing limbs pushed off her bucking body.
With the memory of her parents’ very violent end from the fangs of a gang of young vampires, Julia found the strength to straddle Christopher Walken’s youthful doppelganger once more. Blinded by her own blood and pounded by his stubby hands, she concentrated on stabbing his heart nearly a dozen times and ending the massacre by hacking off his head. The feel of bone getting severed by a sharp knife felt right to Poe.
The youthful vampire, no more than eighteen when he turned, stopped moving. Bloodied and shell-shocked from her first kill, Julia made her way back to her hotel without further attack. Living near Skid Row had its advantages.
As she locked the hotel door carefully behind her, she whispered, “Thank you, Mom and Dad.” Then and only then did she allow herself to collapse in a faint.
9
CHAPTER 1–STUTTER AND SCRATCH
AT THE PRE-ARRANGED TIME, Sister Ann and Goss scratched the secret knock on her new metal-enforced door carted away from the Japanese American Museum down the street. The original had succumbed to rust. Even knowing in her gut that the people standing outside were her friends, Poe had to fight the bile that rose from her throat.
“Breathe from the umbilical and exhale like you have all the time in the world,” the robust nun had told her time and again. She was breathing from the umbilical alright, but she was still gulping air like she’d just climbed Mt. Fuji directly after trekking the Inca Trail.
“No Nosferatu. No Nosferatu, please,” Poe prayed fervently to her parents. The creature from the silent classic film was the face she gave to the terror above ground. Seizing the nearest semi-automatic pistol, Poe unlatched the bolt and thought, The hell with Goss, that snail! I’ll put in the peephole myself.
She yanked open the door.
Sure enough, her most trusted friends, a nun and a giant, stood outside with patient grins on their weary faces. As usual they were literally armed to the end of days.
“Holy Jesus, girl, it took you six minutes to answer the door. That’s a record low,” drawled Goss, 10
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practically crawling inside because of his super-size-me height.
“Well, if you h-had put in a peep h-hole like you said, I would’ve let you in sooner,” Poe countered, disgusted by her stutter. She had been getting better for a while there. Now the h’s, w’s, and occasional p’s tripped her tongue ignominiously.
“Yes,” Sister Ann agreed with Poe, her sweat-stained wimple bobbing. “You’ve been promising to drill a peephole in this child’s door for nearly a month now. Que pasó? And Goss, even though Armageddon’s dropped its ugly face upon us, don’t use the Lord’s name in vain. At least not around me. You know how much it aggravates me.”
Goss bowed his head in exaggerated penitence.
“Sorry, Sister. Must’ve slipped my notice that you’re the last practicing Catholic in town. Next time I come, I promise to bring my best drill.”
Something was off. Poe could feel it. The three usually hugged like it was the last time given the cosmic odds against them. Goss insisted on open affection because he could not stand repressed feelings.
“Only a handful of us left,” he lectured often, directing his words to the fifty-five-year-old nun who preferred to fondle rosary beads to embracing. “On no account should we hold back sentiment because any day now one of us could get killed or worse, become blood cattle.”
The plump yet powerfully dense nun brought Poe a new waterproof pack with lots of pockets to store ammo. With a leather bandolier filled with shotgun shells crisscrossed around her shoulders and a heavy wooden cross dangling upon her chest, the Carmelite looked like a silver-haired bandit from Emiliano Zapata’s time. Her saintly countenance screamed purity and love, clashing most wretchedly with her 11
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soiled and blood-crusted uniform of eradication and death. Poe loved the nun with the dirty habit and a Tennessee twang but had always suspected that she wasn’t quite all there.
“Shoot it in the heart, girl!” the nun instructed fiercely on Poe’s first raid. “Shoot the dang thing in its Godforsaken heart! Do it now for heaven sakes!” The memory left a bad taste in her mouth.
Sometimes Sister Ann confused vampire killing with her beloved but dead religion. Instead of Holy Communion, the creepy crawlies left behind by the gray