Pent

The street that Harry took to the convenience store was poorly lit and the sidewalk was buckled in a couple of places. For some weird reason, the lyrics of an old song kept running through his head, “As I walked out in the streets of Laredo. As I walked out in Laredo one day...”

This was not Loredo... although Lordeo was only a few hours away. “I spied a dear cowboy wrapped up in white linen...” It was an old ballad that a lot of musicians had done a version of. “Wrapped up in white linen and cold as the clay...” In fact, Harry had heard the song only a few hours earlier, maybe that was why he was thinking about it and even humming and singing it out loud to keep him company as he walked along the creepy assed sidewalk...

“Come sit down beside me and hear my sad story... I am shot in the breast and I know I must die...”

It was only recently that this rundown part of town had been officially labeled an arts district by some of the liberal council members who were doing everything they could to escape the reality of the squalor and urban decay that parts of the city had fallen into and seemed unlikely to be resurrected from.

“It was once in the saddle I used to go dashing. It was once in the saddle I used to go gay...” Harry stopped humming and singing an occasional word or two out loud.

Okay... I don’t think this was a BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN kinda thing, he mused.

“But I first took to drinkin’ and then to card playin’, Got shot in the breast and I am dying today.”

Arts district my ass! Harry muttered as he walked up a rise in the sidewalk that was an upward v shape which he’d actually seen kids skateboard over like it was a ramp. Bullshit!

He especially hated this area at night. It had been taken over by a bunch of squatters and instead of the city kicking them all out and condemning the area as they should’ve; they touted it as a district that would one day rival the arts district in Austin. It was a high crime area, drugs and prostitution, and whatever else was conceivable... But Harry MacManus had craved a beer and a hotdog something fierce... one of those “make them yourself hot dogs” and as bad as the area was, the hotdogs were great in the little corner store that he was headed to.

“Ahhhhhh...” he heard coming from somewhere in the darkness.

“Ahh...hhh...” It was a cry that sounded like the combination of fear and pleading somehow.

“Aaaaa hhhhhh...” It’d come from the dark end of an alley that wandered off deep into the blackness between two old buildings that had both served on different occasions as office and manufacturing spaces.

Harry took a step off the sidewalk into the alley and then stopped.

The hair on the back of his neck rose and his scrotum withered itself.

Near the antipodal end of the alley, he could see two pinpricks of light about the height of a man’s head and approximately the size and width between them that might make them gleaming eyeballs.

“Ahhh...” Harry heard again.

He reached into his jeans pocket and pulled out a small penlight that he carried with him when his regular flashlight had dead batteries, like tonight, and he pointed it in the direction of the cries and pressed the button to light it up.

“Skinny?!” he said. It was a homeless dude who lived in this sector, a tall, stringy-haired, thin man who always wore the same dirty grey pants and button-up shirt of approximately the same color. He was being lifted up at the armpits by another man a few inches taller than him.

“Hey!” Harry said. “Hey! What’s going...”

The man stopped lifting the homeless Skinny and turned his face toward Harry. He was blond and strong looking and it was his eyes that Harry had seen gleaming in the dark.

“Help me,” Skinny croaked still suspended by his armpits several feet in the air. “Help...”

And the blond, Nordic-looking dude reached up with his free hand and clasped Skinny’s head in what appeared to be immensely long, gnarly claws and ripped it off his shoulders and threw it at Harry, and hit him square in the chest.

Now, Harry MacManus was not a slight man. He was not a bruiser or a human tank either, or a brick wall, but he was a sturdy dude. He was 5 feet ten inches tall and weighed 180 pounds and had been a college wrestler and kept himself in decent shape, but when Skinny’s head hit him in the chest, it felt cannonball, a cannonball of meat and bone and blood, and it knocked him on his ass.

And then, what happened next, defied Harry’s logic and even imagination.

The Nordic-looking dude who’d just ripped the homeless man’s head off was standing directly over him, looking down at him with those gleaming eyes, and there was blood around his mouth. And he had what looked like fangs, long, sharp, bloody fangs. And he reached down to grab Harry, who was out of breath from being hit in the chest by Skinny’s severed head and half silly still from the fall he’d taken to the sidewalk.

All Harry could do, at first, to defend himself was feebly wave his little penlight at his sizable Viking, looking assailant dude, like it was a miniature light-saber. But then the muscle reflex from Harry’s wrestling days kicked in, and he shot his heel upward, hard at his ghoulish foe’s chin.

Unfortunately, Harry’s ghoulish foe’s reflexes were keener, and he snatched Harry’s heel and began dragging Harry into the pitch-black alley. But then, fortunately for Harry, his head cleared enough, and adrenaline shot through his heart and brain, and he did a full-body flip and jerked his heel out of his attacker’s hand. But then, unfortunately again, the attacker was not prepared to relinquish the battle and his potential meal, and he turned again to lay claws on Harry... when the lights of an approaching vehicle lit them both up.

The sudden blast of illumination seemed to startle the Nordic-looking drinker of blood and ripper of human heads, and faster than one can say Thus spake Zarathustra, he disappeared into the darkness.

Harry wiggled the tiny beam of his penlight toward the end of the alley, and, to his surprise, witnessed the fellow or thing, or whatever it was that had just attacked him, leap up about ten feet and grab hold of the edge of the wrought iron fire escape attached to the old building at the end of the alley, and then launch himself onto the platform. But instead of entering the building through the door that exited the building onto the fire escape, he turned back and stared at Harry for several seconds. Harry was almost certain he could still see the eyes gleaming even from the distance. And then, the Nordic vampire dude sprinted up the metal stairs for a few more flights and disappeared through a shattered out window into the building.

It would’ve been perfect and convenient and timely if the vehicle that’d flashed its headlights on Harry and his blood-lapping bogeyman had been a cop car. But it wasn’t: it was just an old Ford pickup truck that Harry had seen in the neighborhood a few times. He waved his hands around over his head to urge the driver to stop, but he didn’t: he just waved back.

Apparently, the driver had not seen Harry kicking and flailing only a minute earlier to keep himself from being exsanguinated by the devil he’d just fought off. And since there were no other cars or trucks around at that moment, and Harry had forgotten to carry his cell phone with him, he found himself in the dilemma: that either he leave the crime scene exactly as it was and go to the convenience store and call the police, or, go to the convenience store to call the police but carry Skinny’s severed head with him.

There was another option: wait for another vehicle to roll around and then flag it down, or perhaps even a cop if he got lucky. But Harry figured that waiting around would be the riskier business because the sanguisuge that he’d just fought off, might see that the coast was clear and come back for another bite at the apple, or Harry: as it were.

And he couldn’t just leave Skinny’s head lying sideways next to the curb where it had rolled to after it bounced off his chest: a dog might get it, as there were a lot of strays in the neighborhood: or the Viking-looking blood drinker might come back and snatch it up or maybe kick it down the storm drain, or the tire of a car might roll too close to the curb and squash it.

So, Harry picked up some pieces of newspaper to wrap Skinny’s head in and then a discarded plastic bag from Home Depot he found to carry it in and finished his walk to the little convenience store on the corner, where he called the police.

“Yeah there’s been some weird shit going on in the hood lately,” the guy behind the counter said. “It seems like more and more often you hear about homeless people being found dead in their little cardboard box houses or out in the allies. And there’s even been some unexplained deaths of regular citizens in some of the low-rent apartment complexes.”

Harry and the clerk knew one another from Harry shopping there frequently, not by name, just on sight. The guy was early thirties with an ashen complex and looked like he might’ve been a street kid himself at one time, or maybe a punk rocker. There were two small puncture wounds on his neck at his jugular vein below a tattoo of a black widow spider.

“What happened there?” Harry asked and pointed to the kid’s neck.

“Insect bite or something,” the kid said. “I don’t know,” he said. “I noticed it about a week ago when I was shaving.”

“A week ago?” Harry said.

“Yeah,” the kid said and reached up and touched the wound. “It doesn’t seem to want to go away.” And then out of the blue, he added. “This used to be a nice neighborhood. I grew up in this neighborhood, but all the aliens and undocumented immigrants that have crossed our border and come up from who knows where have just about turned it into another third-world country...”

“Transylvania,” Harry said.

“What?” the kid said and then, “Oh yeah, Transylvania, I get it.”

It was about an hour later, when he made it back to the alley accompanied by a cop, that Harry came to know immediately that his instinct had been correct: Skinny’s headless body was missing. A couple of stray dogs crouched where the missing corpse had lain, lapping at the puddle of blood that marked the spot. They snarled when the officer, who was with Harry, chased them away.

“So you’re telling me,” The cop said, “that this big blond, Norwegian-looking dude ripped the head off the shoulders of this homeless guy named Skinny and threw it at you from here, all the way to the sidewalk and hit you smack dab, square in the middle of your chest and knocked you down?”

Harry took a step back from the officer and raised his hands and pointed at the blood stain on his shirt: the shape of which vaguely resembled a human profile.

“And then he grabbed me by the ankle and tried to drag me into the alley,” Harry said. “But I kicked my ankle free and a car came around the corner and when the Nordic guy was blasted in the car’s headlights...”

“He dashed back through the alley and scaled the old Texaco Building,” the cop said.

“The old Texaco building?” Harry said. “I thought it was the old Federal Building.”

“What difference does it make?”

“It doesn’t. I don’t suppose.”

“Are you taking any prescription drugs?”

“No,” Harry said.“Are you on any street drugs?”

“Street drugs?”

“Bath salts maybe.”

“Bath Salts?!” Harry said.

“Synthetic cathinones,” the officer said.

“I know what Bath Salts are,” Harry said.“Well?”

“I’m not on bath salts,” Harry said.

“You’re on something!” the officers said. “Or maybe you need to be on something?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Do you have a history of mental illness?” the cop said. He was a middle-aged fellow and looked fit, clean-shaven, and wore black framed glasses.

“No,” Harry said.

“No auditory hallucinations?” the cop said looking over the top of his glasses.

“No!”

“Demons don’t talk to you?” the officer asked.

“Only on Tuesdays and Thursday!” Harry said. “But it’s Wednesday!” he said. “I’m not on drugs. I’m not imagining things. And even if I was, how do you explain the human head that you have sitting on the hood of your patrol car?”

That’s where they’d left Skinny’s head, in the Home Depot bag, on the hood of the cop car.

“How do you explain it?” the cop said.

“I just did,” Harry said.