Ziggy

There wasn’t much space to spare in the drag queens’ dressing room, but the weather outside had acquired an attitude since the start of my work, so the ladies had crammed me just inside the doorframe on a little folding stool. I sat leaned back against the flimsy wall, foot braced on the door jam. My leg made a barrier between the warm, smoky interior and the cold, peeling-paint facade of Albinoch, the last, best, biggest factory town that Earth had to offer. 

Even in spite of the damp, the open door was doing the ladies and fellas of Club Rapture a world of good. The hot, stuffy air was circulating now, exhaling the various smokes, smells, and vapors out into the outside world. Curling wisps euthanized by the pissing rain.

I smoked a cigarette. After all, what was the tobacco gonna do? Kill me?

It was getting to be the time of night where most functional human beings look for a comfy place to collapse. The show had just ended, and the performers were counting tips and touching up their makeup before re-emerging through the beaded curtains and mingling with the other clubgoers. 

A figure in a hooded, waterproofed windbreaker approached the doorway. He was big enough that had I been a worse doorman, I would have told him to duck as he entered. But as it happened, I didn’t move. “Hey pal,” I said, playing like this man was a stranger and hoping that he was smarter than my client had implied. “This door’s for staff only.”

He looked down at me.

“If you head around the block to the front of the building, security can get you squared away,” I said, cheerfully. Right into a canal somewhere, I did not add. 

“He in there?” the man asked, ignoring my helpful advice.

“Specificity really is a lost art.” My voice rasped from the smoke, but I could never tell if when that happened I sounded tough, or ill. “There’s about a dozen ‘he’s in here, bud, and most of them are presently ‘she’s, so I think you should probably look elsewhere.”

“You know the one I want,” he said. “Else you wouldn’t be here.”

The chatter died away behind me. I didn’t look back. I took my cigarette out of my mouth and pulled the mask back up over my nose so I could enunciate more clearly. “I’m here because you shouldn’t be, Greg. I’ve asked you twice to leave this doorway. Don’t make me make it three.”

“The last guy was bigger. He still can’t walk right.” Greg reached out to grab my tie. “If you won’t move, I’ll move you, tiny.”

I let him. I also let my coat fall away from my side, revealing that my free hand was hovering very close to a battered-but-functional static-charge revolver (standard AMPD issue). “Greg,” I admonished. “This is three.”

He paused, looking at me hard and cold. “Pussy,” he said, like harsh words would be enough to make me cast aside my licensed and registered insurance and fight him man to man. 

“Probably,” I agreed brightly. “But an armed one.”

Greg eyed the gun like someone who’d never had the pleasure of having a superheated nugget of electrically charged heat and light bore a hole in him, but had a healthy nervousness about the idea anyway. 

I shooed him with my cigarette hand. “Hello?” I said. “You’re wrinkling my tie, here. Either leave or give me an excuse to shoot you, idiot.”

Greg hesitated for another moment, but released my shirt. “You’re dead,” he said. “And so’s the bitch.”

Ah, Greg. So close. Half credit. 

He vanished into the night like a big, melodramatic baby vanishes into… whatever one of those would vanish into. The city of Albinoch continued to spit on whichever of her unlucky children happened to be on the streets. 

Slowly, the talk started up behind me again. I allowed myself to relax. I straightened my tie, trying not to show how grateful I was that it hadn’t actually come to blows. 

“Hey.” A voice at my shoulder. My client. I held up the cigarette for him, still scanning the dark. 

“Think he’ll come back?” asked Liam Shay, professionally known as Sara Femme, Angel of Albinoch. He took the cigarette, holding it in a plum-painted pout as he dragged. 

“Probably not tonight,” I said. “In future, no promises.”

He dragged a delicate hand across my shoulder blades. “You’re real for this, Zig. Thank you.”

“Thank me in cash,” I said. But I reached back and squeezed his hand. 

“The restraining order should be in effect day after tomorrow,” Liam  said, coming around to lean on the door frame next to my foot. Sara’s face always surprised me with how delicate it was. Liam was a beautiful man, but a… manly one. Protruding brow, square jaw, the whole deal. But with a sponge and a brush and a hell of a lot of glue, he could create Sara’s ephemeral mask. She had an openness, a welcoming innocence that lured audiences in. When she danced, the stage lights turning her hair into a halo and the rhinestones glittering on her costumes like liquid diamond, any man could fall in love with her. Hell, I had, once upon a time. 

Liam smiled, and I nearly did again. “Studying me, detective?” he asked. 

“How do you get your eyebrows so flat?” I asked, like that was what I’d been thinking about.

He laughed. “You gotta lick the glue before the last layer.”

“Ah.”

“One day I’m gonna get you in my chair, you know.”

“God help us all when you do,” I said. I chuckled. “I don’t think even you could pretty me up.” I looked out into the rain. “So,” I said. “Greg, huh?”

Liam sighed. He hugged himself. “Greg.” 

“How long have you been letting that happen to you?”

“Don’t be an asshole,” he said. “He was sweet at first. And it’s not like you ever come around anymore.”

“No, well, I got dangerously close to developing feelings,” I said, shrugging like that was the only reason.

“Would that be such a bad thing?” Liam asked, straightening half-indignantly. But then he sagged back against the doorframe, hand pressing into his immaculately made-up eye. 

I straightened on my stool. “You okay?”

“Fine,” he said. “Just dizzy all of a sudden.”

I stood and took him by the arm and the small of his back, guiding him to my seat. When he settled, I said, “Now don’t move, I’ll get you a water.” I squeezed his shoulder. 

Liam winced, flinching away from me. 

I smelled blood in the air, hard like iron and sweet like crimson. My mouth flooded with saliva. Things in my gums moved. I swallowed, harder than I meant to. “You’re hurt.”

He shrugged the shoulder I hadn’t squeezed. “It’s nothing; I’m fine.”

Apparently I didn’t look reassured enough, because he pulled down the sleeve of his costume, exposing a bandage that bloomed red where my thumb had made contact with the wound. “See?”

“That doesn’t look like nothing,” I said, eyes trained on the red.

The red the red the red.

“It’s really not bad. These things just take forever to dry out,” Liam said. I could hear his heartbeat, and I couldn’t ignore it anymore, not with the red red red right in front of me. The splotch was growing. I’d opened it back up. Liam’s heart was fast, and though I couldn’t see the color of his cheeks under his makeup, his neck was flushed with… embarrassment? Shame?

“Maybe we should cover that again,” I said, voice dry and cracked. 

Liam looked from it to me. “Are you scared of blood, Ziggy?” 

“Don’t… like looking at it,” I lied. My stomach was doing backflips, but for other reasons. 

“That’s a little weird for a cop, isn’t it?”

“Former cop,” I managed. I swallowed again and tore my eyes away. I grabbed a first aid kit where it hung from a half-sunk screw in the plywood wall and held it out. 

Liam took it, and I saw that flash again, some private ugly emotion as he peeled the old gauze away, revealing a neat semicircle of punctures that welled with more crimson. “Fuck,” I breathed. “You’re Bleeding again? I thought you were off that!”

“Money’s money,” Liam said. He wiped the wound with an antiseptic patch and peeled the adhesive back off a new bandage. “Lots of the girls are doing it. Things are tight, and the bloodbars pay.”

I looked back over my shoulder. The other queens had turned away from the mirror, not even hiding that they were listening in. I could hear all their hearts, all their lives, beating the inside of my skull like timpani drums. It made me want to scream. 

Liam eyed me. “Are you judging us, Ziggy Holiday?”

“No,” I said. Then, more firmly, “No, of course not. I’m worrying about you. Those Delta District fangers aren’t like normal johns. They don’t see you like a person, they see you like food. What if something goes wrong? What if one of them gets too hungry to control himself, or if he’s too rich to care about pesky things like homicide charges?”

“Nothing’s gone wrong yet,” Liam said, voice cool. Sara’s painted face was blank, an impeccable mask. “And I can worry about myself.”

“I’m sure you can,” I said, wrestling the animal inside me down now that the blood was out of sight. “But until the day after tomorrow, that is literally my job, so cut a guy some slack.”

“Thanks, Zig.” Liam stood up. “You should head home, get some shuteye. One of the bouncers is giving me a ride.”

I’d never been a shining beacon of professionalism, but I could recognize a dismissal when one walked up and slapped me. I nodded. “Night, then,” I said. 

“Night.”

I had to pass him to get out the door. For a moment, it seemed like we would hug, break the tension, and go back to our easy conversation. 

But as I got close I caught a whiff of the blood, and for a moment my mind’s eye was overwhelmed with the image of me sinking my teeth into Liam’s throat, tearing his flesh, and following his twitching body to the cracked cement floor. Drinking my fill as the pristine white of his costume bled red red red red red.

I ducked around him and stepped into the cold rain. Albinoch spit on me too, and I was grateful that to her at least, I was just another faceless child in her anonymous womb. 

My stomach twisted, hungry, and beneath my mask I bared my teeth against the sensation of it. 

I made it home in a haze. It wasn’t all that far to walk, and I stuck to better-lit areas. No reason to mess with anything hiding in the shadows. 

Albinoch had a vampire problem. And I was part of it. 

I lived and worked on the fifth floor of a five-story walk-up, sandwiched between two towering corp-owned apartment complexes. My building looked like the ugly kid sibling of the three, squat and mismatched and a little lopsided where the back wall, closest to the canal, had settled onto the foundations. 

Before I could enter the building I had to punch in a code. The mesh maille gate in front of the stoop rose, rattling as the little engine churned, and the four steel deadbolts in the reinforced doors thunked into their unlocked positions in mechanical succession. Only after all this could I push on the imitation oak and open them up. I stepped inside and breathed deep. Ah, mildew, cat shit, and pot smoke. The place just had such a homey, welcoming oeuvre to it; how could I go anywhere else?

The sound of rain didn’t stop when I stepped inside. In fact, it was amplified by the way the droplets pinged into strategically placed buckets on the floor and the stairs. The building had a proper, vaulted atrium. One where, hypothetically, folks could sit and chat or read in the light of the skylight. But the caulk around the glass had gone over the years, the seals were all eroded, and now if Albinoch even considered trying on a little bit of weather, the whole building leaked. That, combined with the kind of personal element that tended to live in places like this, discouraged too much in the way of public loitering. 

I hit the button on the wall that would close up the doors again and lower the gate. 

After all, we wouldn’t want a vampire getting into the building. 

I had to dance around the buckets on the stairs, but I was grateful that the raindrops gave me a repetitive rhythm to focus on and calm my mind. Once upon a time I might have used my breathing, or my pulse, counting breaths and beats until I drowned out the noise. But you couldn’t count something that wasn’t there. 

I hadn’t been prepared tonight. My supply was running low, I'd been rationing, and I hadn’t thought I’d actually see any bloodshed. Dumb of me, maybe. 

There were four doors on the fifth floor. Three led to apartments, and one led up to the roof. 

Someone had stuck a wad of gum on the brass plaque next to my door, so the sign instead read: 

Holiday & Co     ective Agency

Lost t         ticles found

Stolen      ds returned

Appo  tment Only

Some people, man. No respect. I picked the gum off with my fingernail and buffed the little sign with the sleeve of my shirt. I stuck the wad to the underside of the banister instead. 

There was no & Co. I could barely scrape by on the jobs I got; splitting the workload any further was unthinkable. But Holiday & Co sounded like a way more official name for a Detective Agency than Just That One Guy. 

Satisfied my door had been returned to its former glory, I turned around and knocked on the one directly opposite me.

The occupant kept me waiting, but eventually Margaret Navarro opened the door to her apartment. She held the top of the doorframe and leaned on her own arms. She was taller than me, but so were a lot of people. I tried not to hold it against her. 

“You’re up late,” she said, her voice rich and deep, a perfect recreation of one honed for projection and public speaking by her days in the clergy. Maggie’d had throat cancer a few years ago. They had to take out a bunch of tissue, and her vocal cords were replaced by some Allysoft branded high-end voice-box. The scar was neat, almost invisible. The only thing that gave it away was an occasional tinny quality, a slight echo that indicated she was speaking with something other than her original hardware. 

“So are you,” I said. 

She smiled, and I couldn’t help but smile back. She had one of those faces, with a regal roman nose and dark, intelligent eyes, that turned her smile into a flame that warmed everything in sight. “Fair enough. You want your package?”

“Pretty please?” I asked. 

She nodded and released the doorframe. 

“What’s your finder’s fee this time?” I called, as she retreated back towards the kitchen.

“Come inside and have a margarita,” she replied. “I can’t sleep, and I’m bored, and I haven’t forgotten that rumor that if you get wasted enough you remember how to play the piano.”

“I could go for a margarita,” I said. It had been a long day. But I thought about the way I’d left things at the Rapture. The look on Liam’s face when I realized he was Bleeding. The hurt that had sparked when I left the dressing room without making up. The gnawing in my gut not just from guilt. “But, you know what, can we rain check? I’m exhausted.”

Margaret came back, holding the disposable styrofoam cooler. “I thought you didn’t sleep,” she said. 

“Oh, if only that kept me from being tired.” I chuckled grimly and took it. “Thanks, Mags, you might get that sainthood after all.”

“Nah, I spend too much time with you for that,” she said. “Rain check.”

I nodded. “Night.”

“Goodnight, Detective.” She closed the door, and I was alone. 

Again.

Somehow, I kept doing this to myself. 

I let myself into my home office and locked the door behind me. The place wasn’t a palace, but I tried to keep things nice. The front room was done up as a waiting area, with a desk for the secretaries I could never keep and chairs for the clients I could barely find. There was inoffensive art on the walls and plastic flowers in a vase on the coffee table. I ran my hand over the credenza where my mail piled up, and my fingertips came away dusty.

Business was booming.

This place wasn’t really supposed to be a professional space. There were three doorways  off the “waiting room,” and only two of them had doors. One had a sign on it that said “Office.” The other had a sign that said “Employees only,” and led to my bedroom. The last, open doorway was separated from the apartment only by a beaded curtain, and despite my best efforts the kitchen was still pretty clearly visible. That was where I headed now, raising a hand preemptively so the beads didn’t get stuck in my hair. I hefted the cooler onto the counter and pulled out its contents: dark, red liquid stored in sealed plastic bottles, a little red drop icon on the side. 

This packaging always freaked me out. I felt like blood should come in bags, not bottles. 

Albinoch has a vampire problem. I know I said that already, but it’s worth repeating. 

The first Vampires, called Lazarines for the way they seemed to resurrect from death, came out of the mines. BXE Metals and Minerals was tunneling deep into the earth, hunting for raw materials, when they found something else. A little fuckin’... amoeba or something, a parasite that had been dormant for thousands, if not millions of years. And it got busy, colonizing the miners, and then Albinoch, with ease. Lazzies were the real boogeymen, the things that went bump in the night. Horrible, rotting monsters with the voices and faces of your mother, your aunt, your brother, your grade school-age child. Corpses glutting themselves on your neighbors’ lifeblood. There were curfews, there was testing, international and off-planet travel was locked down. We couldn’t even flee. No one knew where the infection started or how it was spread. 

But there’s a silver lining in everything. If you’re rich enough to afford it. At first, every scientific mind in Albinoch came together to look for a cure, every corporate pocket opened deep out of a sense of civic duty. They didn’t find it. But what they did find changed the direction of their research entirely. 

Turns out, playing with the amoeba’s genes led to the development of a very special drug. An expensive drug, but one that could cure any ailment, stop the aging process, gift the patient with strength and speed and sight and smell beyond the usual mortal ken. 

With just a few pesky side effects. 

The treatment was very exclusive, but the wealthy and powerful of Albinoch became the first of a select group to ascend to a new, undying social stratosphere. They tried to call themselves the Pristine, which just had all kinds of connotations that left a bad taste in everyone’s mouth. The name that came to stick was Iscarian. Judas Iscariot, so the old story goes, was cursed to wander the earth for eternity, living on blood alone, after betraying Jesus and leaving him to die. Seemed like a fitting title for the people who abandoned Albinoch for immortality. 

Anyway, that’s who this bottled stuff was originally made for. Pristinico Pharmaceuticals, who made the drug, also developed HemoSynth™, a designer blood substitute chemically perfected to give a growing dracula all the nutrients he needed. And flavored to boot, or so the marketing claimed. 

Now, HemoSynth™  isn't too readily available outside the Delta District, the stretch of Albinoch the rich and bloodthirsty call home—but I have a guy. He doesn't know why I want it; I think he thinks it's a sex thing.  

The former Padre across the hall is the only one who knows about my condition, as it happens. Because the thing about me is I never got that fancy Iscarian treatment. I got infected the old fashioned way. But I'm… different. Fuck knows why; I sure don't. I should be a gibbering Lazzie, crouched in some derelict somewhere sucking on rats. But when my body went, my mind didn't follow. So now, I get the worst of both worlds. Death and taxes.

I cracked the seal one one of the bottles, hunger twisting my guts into complicated sailor's knots. This batch was supposed to taste like a turkey club and pepperoni pizza, but I'd be shocked if they did. Mostly, the Synth just tasted like old, dead blood. Meat and rust. Staring at the little drop logo on the bottle, I ran my fingers over the knotted scar bisecting my face, from my left jaw to just over my right eyebrow. It never hurt, but it felt like it should; sometimes, I imagined it did. I was imagining now, letting the half-remembered ache beat a rhythm across my nose and around my eyes.

I knocked back the drink, and regretted again passing on the Padre’s mixology. Cold and thick, the Synth never seemed to get my predatory hindbrain all excited the way even the imagination of the real stuff did. But it did hush some of the writhing in my middle. 

After Liam paid me, I’d have to buy him something pretty. An apology. I’d never been too good at explaining myself, even before my explanations started meriting torches and pitchforks. “Subpar communication skills,” as my annual performance reviews used to insist. I was always better at expressing myself through gestures, tokens. It meant playing cleanup crew more than I wanted to, but if you knew me well enough, you figured it out eventually. 

I put the blood in the fridge and turned out the kitchen lights. Albinoch’s ambient glow, diluted neons and greens that seemed somehow to be nebulously alive, cast strange shadows as the apartment’s only light source. I found myself moving through the familiar space carefully, like one of the patches of shadow might reach out and grab my ankle. I stepped into my office. It was less well-kempt than my waiting room, on account of it actually seeing some use every once in a while. Papers scattered over my desk, and a map of ol’ Greg’s whereabouts orbited in the air above it, the holoprojector I’d left running humming a low, ambient note in the quiet. Photos of Greg looped on my desktop, candids taken when I was on duty with Liam. I’d send them all to him when my work wrapped up in a couple days, just in case he needed any more proof of stalking to make the courts happy. 

I sank into my office chair, leaning back and looking up at the ceiling. Albinoch’s night lights played over everything in here too. Sunrise was in a few hours, and I’d have to close everything up. But for now, I could bask in gentle, natural darkness. I turned on some music, loud enough to quiet the street sounds outside, and let myself float in a bubble just for me. 

Someone pounded on my door. 

I sat up. 

Someone pounded again, five decisive slams of fist to wood. I checked my watch, confirming that yes, it was still dumb early, the silent hours of the night when even the rats were tucked up all snug in their walls. 

Maybe they had the wrong apartment. 

No, they didn’t, of course they didn’t. You didn’t make it into this building, past all the precautions and armaments by accident, you didn’t walk up four flights of stairs by accident, and you didn’t knock on a door with the name of the guy living there written on it by accident. Whoever it was, they were here because they meant to be. 

Fuck. 

Did I desperately need clients? Sure. But I also wasn’t lying when I told Margaret I was tired. What I would have given for a morning alone with my thoughts, my blood, and a good old Voida Nestor Corp porno. 

If they could read the name on my door, surely they could also read where it said “By Appointment Only.”

The pounding came again, and I forced myself to stand. If they kept this up I’d have to reckon with my neighbors, people who (except for Margaret) I tried to avoid whenever possible. 

Approaching my door, I pulled the filtered mask I wore up over my nose and mouth. The filters couldn’t help me breathe, but the mask hid some of the more telling symptoms of my condition nicely. 

I pressed my eye to the peephole. I had to stand on my tiptoes to reach, but just a little. 

The hallway was empty. Pressing my ear to the door, I couldn’t hear any heartbeats or breaths to hint at someone hiding out of sight. 

Good. Great, even. 

I hadn’t yet taken my gun off my belt, and I rested my hand on the butt. I slid the chain on the door away, turned the deadbolt, and eased the door open. 

Still no immediate signs of life, but the smell of human fear lingered in the air of the hall, acrid and animal. 

Shit. I tried to muster a sense of relief that I could have my quiet morning after all, but that smell soured my mood. 

Humans were such self-betraying creatures. It never ever mattered how brave you tried to be in the face of monsters, your body would sell you out every time. 

I didn’t like smelling it. I felt like I was trespassing, peeping on a mental landscape I hadn’t been invited to observe. 

I walked to the banister and looked down. I hadn’t been so reluctant that my fleeing client would have had time to disappear. I should have heard harsh breaths, footsteps on the stairs. Something. But the only sound was rain, splashing into dented old buckets at uneven, organic intervals. 

Great, I’m being solicited by ghosts now. And I can’t even get them to hire me.

I shook my head and turned away from the stairs—but stopped when something on the landing below me caught my eye. 

The carpet on the stairs had once been brown, I think. But it had long since gone green and a little mushy from persistent damp. Smushed down into the packed, matted fibers, like it had been stepped on, something glinted. 

I eyed it skeptically from the top of the stairway. My better judgment beckoned me back inside. Drink your fill, it said. Rest, relax. Liam might need you, and what happens if you’re tangled up in something new and dangerous?

My better judgment made a good point. 

But the memory of the frantic pounding and the still-lingering stink of human terror made a better one—or a louder one, anyway—and my feet were descending the stairs without me ever giving the official go-ahead. 

I stopped on the landing and crouched. There was something faint, but unmistakably there, an irony miasma lingering in the cavity above my soft palate. I fished the glint out of the damp, musty carpet, and my suspicions were confirmed. 

The metal of the earring was silvery, maybe titanium, from the weight. A little cleat, the kind  canal boats lashed to all over Albinoch. In the places on either end where the heavy masonry bolts would be on a real cleat, this one was studded with fluorescent yellow crystals. 

It was a nice, unique piece. Simple and stylish. It probably would have been even prettier had the whole thing not been smeared in blood. Fine, purple hairs were tangled in the earring back, likely from when it had been liberated from its owner’s flesh. The red streaks were glistening, not yet dry, glittering in the stairway’s anemic lighting. I found myself grateful that I’d eaten before. If this earring had awoken the hungry animal in me I would have had to take a long look at myself. 

Okay. Metal was room temperature, blood was wet. On an object this small… I closed my eyes and thought. I hadn’t used my spatter analysis in ages; the specifics were getting fuzzy. But, by my guess, this earring could only have been dropped a half hour ago, maximum—a very generous maximum. Odds were good that this lost bauble had something to do with my mysterious door knocker. 

But earrings  don’t just fall out with the back intact on their own. This stud was ripped out. Violently. Which introduced a complication. 

Did this little trinket belong to my frightened knocker? Or to the person responsible for frightening them? Either way, it was unique enough to give me an idea about who could tell me more. 

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