After the Fire — Saturday, February 23, 1991, 5:48 PM

Brighton Street, Capitol Hill Denver, Colorado

Flash came up out of the dark without the small mercies of waking. No grog, no stretch, no slow accumulation of where. The body turned on. Eyes open, the radiator hissing too high, the streetlight bleeding brown through the shade. Saturday evening. The window said it. The cold in his hands said it. His hands knew the time before the clock did.

The clock on the dresser said 17:51.

Through the floor and one wall, Joseph Hadrick’s cat was crying for food. Long complaint, the sound a cat makes when the bowl has been empty for hours and nobody is coming to fill it. The cat was one floor and one wall away from the reason nobody was coming.

Flash sat up. The mattress took his weight. The body that rose from it was not the body that had lain down on Friday morning. He knew that without checking. He knew other things too – that Terri was in the apartment because he could feel her there, a second pressure in the rooms, a second weight. That Marcus had said sundown, and sundown was now. That none of this was right and all of it was true.

The kitchen light made a yellow slice under the bedroom door. She hadn’t slept in the bed. He remembered leaving her at the table with the journal and the case and the Bunsen apparatus and the rack of glass tubes and the one vial that mattered. He remembered thinking she should sleep somewhere and not knowing where to put her.

In the kitchen, a chair scraped. She heard him wake.

He was through the bedroom door before he thought about opening it. The hall was six steps. His coat on the hook, boots by the door with salt-rim, the wallpaper he’d never thought about long enough to hate. None of it registered as his. It registered as familiar, and there was a difference, and he’d only just noticed.

She was at the kitchen table. The Tiffany knock-off from the Goodwill on Colfax pooled yellow light around her hands. The lab kit was open but rearranged – vials sorted, the Bunsen burner set aside, the journal closed and weighted with a coffee mug. The Klondike letter under her left palm. Her right hand around a glass of water she wasn’t drinking.

She wasn’t okay. Her color was wrong – not pale, but the wrong kind of pale, a pale that didn’t belong to a person who’d slept. Her pupils tracked up to him as he came around the counter, and they tracked too fast, doing something they shouldn’t have been doing in that light.

He could smell it. The thinness around her. It had nothing to do with the air. It was the same thinness he’d felt on the landing the night before, ten seconds before he went through Hadrick’s door.

“You’re up,” she said. Voice steady. Picked-up-and-put-down steady.

The glass of water trembled once and stopped.

“Yep,” Flash said. “Now what.”

Her eyes went to the Klondike letter and back. He could see her deciding which of the three things she’d been sitting on to lead with.

“Now we figure out what we can do and what we can’t.” She turned the journal sideways. Inside the front cover, on the blank flyleaf, in her handwriting in pencil: a column. Short entries. Some crossed out. Can’t go in the sun (probably). Can’t eat. Bleed but slow, heal fast. Hear/smell more. Teeth. Strength – verified. Sleep at sunrise. Need blood – verified, once.

Her finger stopped at the last line. Didn’t tap it.

“I need to know what mine does,” she said. Eyes on the list. “I haven’t tested it. I don’t want to test it in here.”

The kettle on the back burner wasn’t on. She’d put it there at some point and never lit it. She noticed him noticing and almost laughed, a single dry pull of breath through the nose.

“Force of habit,” she said. “I made you a list and I made the tea I can’t drink.”

Behind her, his phone. The red message light dark. Marcus said sundown. The clock above the stove said 17:55.

Outside, in the alley, a car door closed. Not slammed. Closed. Then nothing.

“So we’re vampires,” Flash said. “Does that mean coffins and garlic?”

She looked at him for a long second. The dry breath came back, almost making it to her face this time.

“I slept on your couch and I’m still here. So probably not coffins. Probably just dark.” She picked up the pencil and added four lines to the list. Coffin – UNVERIFIED. Garlic – UNVERIFIED. Cross – UNVERIFIED. Mirror – UNVERIFIED. She set the pencil down parallel to the journal’s spine. “I checked the mirror. In the bathroom. I’m in it. So that one’s a myth, or it doesn’t kick in for a day.” One shoulder. “The book doesn’t say. He didn’t write any of that down. He wrote down what he was trying to do. Not what he was.”

Her eyes went past him, at the kitchen doorway, the dark hall.

“He was trying to undo it, Flash. The whole journal. Every entry. He was trying to undo it and he kept failing and he wrote down every way it failed.”

The water glass. The pencil parallel to the spine. The kettle on the unlit burner.

“I don’t know what to do with that yet,” she said.

The clock above the stove said 17:57.

“Wait,” Flash said. “If he was trying to undo it – why did he do it to us?”

Her hand stayed flat on the closed journal. Her mouth did the small thing, the corner that almost moved and didn’t. Then the longer thing in her eyes, the calculation that ran and ran and stopped without a result.

“I don’t know,” she said.

She opened the journal to a page near the back, marked with a strip of grocery receipt. She’d been here today, at this table, more than once.

“He’s writing in French and the handwriting goes to hell after a while. But he’s not writing like a man about to run an experiment. He’s writing like a man who already knows it won’t work. The last third is self-injections. Him. Over and over.” She turned pages. Pencil-thin dates down the margin, then no dates, then entries that got short, then handwriting that was a man losing. Flash could see it from across the table without reading French.

“He wasn’t testing it on us,” she said. The trembling was back in the glass, a single ring on the water’s surface. “He was testing it on himself. We weren’t the experiment. We were the dose.”

She closed the journal.

“That’s what it looks like. I could be wrong.”

In the hall outside the apartment, the floorboard by the stairwell – the one that creaked when someone was heavy enough – creaked. Then nothing. Then again, closer.

Flash opened the door. The peephole had shown Marcus – black wool coat, watch cap, one hand in the pocket pulled down by the weight of the Beretta. He was inside in one step. Turned the deadbolt himself. His eyes did a circuit of the apartment in a second and a half – door, window, hallway, kitchen, Terri, Flash.

“Sorry I’m late. Went to Curtis Park first. Wanted to see if anyone had been by.” A head-tilt. “Nobody had.”

Flash held out his hand. “Give me my gun back.”

Marcus brought the Beretta out grip-first, slow, telegraphed. Flash took it. Dropped the mag – full, brass winking under the kitchen light – seated it, felt the slide. Loaded. Cocked-and-locked the whole walk from Curtis Park.

“Round in the chamber,” Marcus said. “Safety on. I didn’t fire it.”

Terri stood at the corner of the table. Journal under her arm.

“Sit down,” she said. “Please.”

Marcus read the please. Sat. Coat still on. Watch cap still on. The kind of sitting that was two seconds from standing.

“Talk to me,” he said.

Terri confirmed it. Flash confirmed it. The same wrongness in the air around all three of them, the same not-quite-breath, the same pupils. Marcus watched them checking him and didn’t ask what they were doing. He already knew.

“Yeah,” he said. “Me too. Looked at myself in the rearview on the way over. Didn’t like what I saw.”

They loaded out. Terri had been packing the list in her head while she made the tea she couldn’t drink. The duffel from Flash’s closet – lab kit, journal, Klondike letter, Prestor’s notebooks, the wooden Anti-Body case on top where it could come out first.

Marcus checked the window. “Crown Vic two doors down on the front side. Two men in it. We go down the back stairs.”

Flash took his coat. His keys. He felt the weight of the apartment behind him – Hadrick one floor down, his cat hungry, the dish unfilled – and didn’t do anything about it. The dish stayed empty. The body stayed where the body was.

Two flights of painted concrete. The fire door opened onto the alley. Twenty-four degrees. Flash’s breath did not fog. None of them fogged.

The IROC started on the first crank. Marcus in the back, passenger side, where he could watch the alley behind them and the street ahead. Nobody asked for the radio.

Monica’s brother’s house was on Race Street east of Cheesman Park, where the houses got bigger and the trees got older and the residential dark was different from what they’d left. White Victorian, blue trim. Volvo wagon in the drive and behind it a brown Buick LeSabre that didn’t belong to anyone they knew.

Marcus read the plates on a walk-by. Civilian. Terri went to the door. Daniel opened it – tall, sweater, the shoulder-drop of a man who’d been hoping for different news. She went in. Flash and Marcus sat in the IROC watching the house until Flash couldn’t sit anymore and knocked.

Monica Belhurst was on the couch in a borrowed cardigan too big for her. Holding a glass of bourbon she couldn’t drink.

“Close the door,” she said.

She sent Daniel upstairs. Set the bourbon on the coffee table and pushed it away. “I’ve been holding it since noon so Danny wouldn’t ask questions. It smells like paint thinner now.”

Terri laid out the intel. Marcus said the word: vampires. Nobody flinched.

Monica looked at Flash. “You fed last night.” Not a question.

“Yeah. Downstairs neighbor.”

“He’s dead,” Terri said. “The amount Flash took – I watched. He’s dead, or he’s going to be.”

Monica counted what they had. A body. Plainclothes in a Crown Vic. A Detective Brandt canvassing since morning. A husband upstairs with a broken wrist who remembered everything and wasn’t one of them. One dose of Anti-Body Number Two. Five vampires.

Marcus put the brass key on the coffee table. “Colorado National Bank. Safety deposit box. Bank opens Monday.”

Flash punched his fist into his palm. “I say we find this guy and beat some answers out of him.”

“Which guy,” Monica said.

“Prestor.”

“Prestor’s dead, Flash.”

“Then whoever sent him –”

Marcus pushed off the wall. “He’s not wrong. Prestor didn’t operate in a vacuum. Somebody in this city knew what he was.”

Monica picked up the key. “Bank’s closed until Monday. We have tonight and tomorrow night.”

Terri counted on her fingers. “Hadrick’s body. Crown Vic. Brandt canvassing. Mavis and Suzy. And I need to eat.”

Marcus: “We need to figure out how to do that without killing anybody. Because right now the only data point we have is Flash, and it’s hard to stop.”

Monica’s call: feeding first. Nobody was useful hungry. Flash was full. Flash drove.

Five Points. Saturday night on Welton Street. Neon and foot traffic and music from open doors, cooking grease and cold air, the human density that made Flash’s new senses ring.

Terri was the first problem. She locked onto a man leaning against a check-cashing wall – brown jacket, cop-plain, gun on his right hip – and started toward him with her eyes blown black and her teeth changing. Flash felt the speed in his legs before he decided to use it. Crossed forty feet in something that wasn’t walking and caught her arm, firm but not crushing.

She turned. Eyes wrong. Teeth halfway out.

Then she saw his face. The teeth retracted in stages.

“Flash. I was going to –”

“I know. Not that one.”

Marcus found someone better. Alley behind the Rossonian. A man on a milk crate with half a bottle of Night Train, singing to himself. Flash walked Terri there. She knelt. “Hey there. You lost, honey?” “A little.” Two, three swallows. She stopped.

“I stopped,” she said. The man on the milk crate hummed and leaned back against the brick. Alive.

Marcus and Monica fed after. Alleys on 26th and 25th. Quick. Controlled. Three clean feeds. Nobody died.

They reassembled under a streetlight on Welton that buzzed and flickered, and for a moment they stood there with color in their faces that hadn’t been there an hour before, and the cold didn’t touch them, and the neon made their eyes look almost human.

Cherry Hills Village was forty minutes south on Broadway. White brick, black shutters, circular drive. The Jaguar XJ6 said Emerson was home.

Emerson Wilkershire III opened the door in a bathrobe over yesterday’s wrinkled shirt. Shoes on the wrong feet. Hands shaking. His manservant Windsor Martin hovered behind him until Monica sent him to bed. Emerson’s voice, dismissing Windsor, was the voice of a man holding a shape that had already broken: “Windsor. It’s late. These are friends.”

Flash leaned forward. “We need to talk about the hungry thing.”

Emerson’s hands stopped shaking long enough to grip the arm of the chair. “I tried to eat toast. It came back up. Water. Scotch. All of it.”

Marcus: “It’s blood. That’s the only thing that works.”

Flash: “I did it last night. I didn’t know how either. But I’m standing here because I did it and you’re sitting there because you didn’t.”

Emerson looked at his hands. They were thin and white and the veins showed blue through skin that had no business being that transparent. “Does it hurt them?”

Terri: “No. It’s the opposite. That’s part of the problem, actually.”

They drove him back to Five Points. Flash walked him through it – somebody there, somebody watching, somebody to say his name when the swallowing didn’t want to stop. What Flash hadn’t had. Emerson fought himself at four. Flash said his name twice. He stopped.

“Oh,” Emerson said.

One word. All the words in it.

Back at Cherry Hills. 21:08. Five fed vampires around Emerson’s dining table. Terri wrote the list in pencil on the journal’s back flyleaf – the body, the cops, the bank, the vial, the mortals who knew, the mortals who didn’t. Eight lines. Everything they had and everything they owed.

Monica tapped the third line. “Hadrick is the most time-sensitive.”

Flash and Terri went back to Brighton Street at 21:30. The Crown Vic was gone.

Hadrick’s apartment was unlocked. The body was in the bed, gray-white, no blood on the sheets because the wounds had sealed. The cat was on the kitchen counter, talking again.

Terri wrapped him in a spare bedsheet. Flash picked him up and the weight was nothing – sixty, seventy pounds of a man who’d weighed twice that alive. They went down the back stairs and into the IROC trunk.

The cat went with Terri. She held it against her chest with both hands and the cat pressed into her because she was warm and the apartment was not.

South Platte River. Burnham Yard. The industrial stretch where the service road turned to gravel and the lights stopped. The river was fast and black with February snowmelt, running high between concrete banks that gave way to frozen mud. Flash carried Hadrick down the bank. Unwrapped the sheet. The body was light and stiff and the skin had the texture of candle wax in the cold.

He held the man at the water’s edge. Joseph Hadrick. Downstairs neighbor. Sixty-three. Cat owner. Dead because Flash Simpson came home hungry and didn’t know how to stop.

Flash let go. The current took him. Ten feet. Twenty. The river closed over him and the dark water carried him downstream toward the rail yards and whatever came after that, and Flash stood on the bank with the sheet in his hands and the smell of the river filling his new senses, minerals and diesel and cold, and didn’t feel what he was supposed to feel. He felt the absence of what he was supposed to feel. That was worse.

Terri ran the cleanup at Flash’s apartment. Flipped the carpet runner, washed Hadrick’s glass, staged the place as a break-in – drawer out, shoebox tipped, door frame damaged. Flash grabbed clothes, his .38, his shaving kit. 22:15. Done.

Back to Cherry Hills. The basement. Lab kit on the corner table. Journal. Vial case. Brass key. The duffel.

The cat found the guest bed and claimed it. Turned twice. Settled. Closed its eyes.

Sunrise came at 06:22. Flash felt it before the clock confirmed – something in the blood tracking the star that could kill them. The pull started in his chest and spread outward, not sleep, not exhaustion, the body’s absolute insistence that consciousness was over. He lay down on the basement floor. Cold concrete under his back. Exposed joists above. Below, whatever he was now.

The body shut off. No grog, no stretch, no slow departure. Gone.

The cat slept on the bed. Five dead people slept around it, and the cat did not care what they were, only that the room was warm and the morning was not.