Tell Your Friends [Adley Reed]

[Samael De Armas (DELETED 8006)]

The stale scent of old gasoline was stifling; nearly as oppressive as the June heat just beyond the the garage door. Late afternoon sunlight bled through its gray windows; creating thin, anemic bars against the concrete. The glass had grown cloudy over the years; faded by punishing decades of dust storms and their scouring grit. Dust motes curled like smoke in the slant of light; twisting in on themselves as they drifted. The rasping chorus of cicadas rose like hoarse whispers. Muted. Distant. It looked like a morgue. What little floor space remained was covered by canvas tarp; their surfaces a washed-out shade of gray; bleached colorless by the sun. Remnants of plaster and flecks of paint collected along their crease. The canvas stretched over a series of vague outlines. Misshapen and sunken, as still as a corpse awaiting autopsy.

"What is it?"

"It's a 1934 Brough Superior." Michael's voice was low. Reverent. There was an urgency to the words; a tension. A sharp yearning that he would only come to understand years later. Michael talked about motorcycles the way most men talked about women.

"How much did you --?"

"Two hundred and forty." There was a subtle thinning of his lips; the corner of his mouth gradually curving into a faint smirk.

"Dad's gonna kill you."

"Us. You're going to help me rebuild her."

"Think I'll pass."

"You owe me."

"********. For what?"


The Brough's engine idled with a sound closer to a muted purr than the congested snarl of its modern counterparts. It was sleek; the body of it polished to a glossy black. It had endured a few upgrades since falling into his stewardship, naturally. Most tellingly, the pair of saddlebag amps that straddled either side of the bike. The fact that they were hidden from view did little to muffle their output, as evidenced by the gritty thump of sound that crackled from each; loud enough in their output that the bass registered as a second pulse in the hollow of his throat. As a low-frequency vibration that rattled through the roots of his teeth. His wrist twisted, and the engine cut, signaling a slow return of the night sounds of the city previously strangled beneath it.

The gas station was largely deserted. There was only the dim flicker of the florescent lighting and the young gas station attendant inside of the small convenience store; washed out and pale looking through the yellowed plexiglass that separated them. He swung a leg over the bike a moment later, fingers absently slipping into his back pocket for his wallet. He approached the pump, briefly locking eyes with the young woman.

Declined. "****." The word escaped his lips with a sharp exhale. It was a violent sound; oxygen forcing its way through tightly clenched teeth. He took a moment to compose himself; blowing out a breath. The thin edge of the plastic bit into his fingers as he swiped the card through the reader a second time. The movement was slower, more controlled. Precise. There was a pause. Processing... For a split second, he relaxed, the tension easing from his shoulders. The muted click of the reader gave way to a second message in the space of a breath. Declined. The fractured lettering was stark, back lit against the sodium glare of the overhead lighting. Samael's lips thinned. Of course. There was no doubt in his mind that his father was to blame. A silent protest, born out of the naive belief that, if he froze the assets, sooner or later the prodigal son would return. He rose a fist a moment later, driving his knuckles against the side of the machine.

The sound made the attendant flinch. Her narrow shoulders drew together underneath the thin fabric of her pastel cardigan; the left shoulder laid bare. A constellation of freckles scattered across her skin; pale against the tan that was too even to have been natural. She fixed him with a look that somehow managed to combine both a doe-like anxiety and bored disdain all at once. Then, with a wet snap of her bubblegum, she turned back to her magazine. **** this city, he thought, disengaging the kickstand with a firm nudge of the toe of his boot. The engine roared to life a split second later, as he sped from the station.

He slowed an hour later. It was a reflexive gesture; habitual. A kneejerk response to the strobbing flash of red and blue lights as they spun in silence, illuminating the brick of the nearby apartment complexes, and the long reels of caution tape that cordoned off the main entrance. The door hung ajar; each sweep of the emergency lights revealing a confusion of images. Charcoal vests. The searing white of camera flashes. He realized he'd idled too long when an officer began their approach.

"Sir, I'm going to have to ask you to clear the area."

]"I have documents for a Mr. Martinez?"

The man eyed him for a moment; the sweep of his gaze stern and slow, as if he wasn't entirely sure whether Samael was ******* with him or not.

"I'm sorry?"

]"I'm with Osler, Hoskin, & Harcourt." The cadence of his tone was smooth. Confident. He tried his novel best to shape his expression into something appropriately contrite. I'm just a courier, man. I don't make the rules.

His gaze swept up a moment later. There was a fire escape to his immediate left. Perfect.

[Adley Reed]

Each evening was a ritual of extracting himself from the Hive. Though, the beginning of the evening was never so hard as the end of it was. It was normally after they’d all come home from their various activities for the evening that they tangled up in each other. And when Adley left, it was from the tangle of limbs that he pulled himself.

Just because he was a vampire didn’t mean that Adley could be idle. They all still needed money to survive; they couldn’t lay around like servants of the Bacchanalia. And, besides which, Adley liked his work. It was work that he himself had chosen, an occupation that he enjoyed. It was an excuse to be witness to violence, both of mankind and of nature. Though, mankind was a part of nature, wasn’t it? All violence could be said to have been caused by nature.

The engine of the gold jeep came to life beneath Adley; he dressed in jeans and boots, a hooded jumper and a leather jacket over top. Beside him, his camera, the lens covering the glass eye that was so eager to capture the violence, to immortalise it in the pages of the news – splashed across the screens of the computers and the phones, the tablets and the television screens. An endless cycle. Violence begets violence.

Adley sat with the radio on; its frequency was set to pick up the conversations between the police and the ambulances, the fire brigades and the phone stations. To begin with, the chatter was mindless; it took Adley time to catch on to the thread that he wanted to follow. He put the jeep into gear and eased out into the city; something that he did often, cruising the streets to look for a perfect scene.

The radio, however, announced a scene nearby; Adley did a u-turn and sped through a red to get there first; from the gearbox he retrieved a lanyard. A fake one, of course, but it made him look official. When he arrived, so too were the police, but the chaos was such that he was able to leap from his vehicle and become part of the scene. One of the first camera flashes was his, though he was soon joined by others. Their photos would be tainted by the flashing blue and red. Adley’s would be pure.

The scene was gruesome. They’d no doubt call it some kind of gang war, but did these people really belong to a gang? Adley knew better. These people had been killed by vampires, their blood spilled in haphazard ways. Was this a whim, or was it meditated? Or did someone just want to sate their thirst? Adley didn’t know whether to be disgusted or whether he ought to be jealous that he had to miss out.

Nearby, he heard the words: documents for a Mr. Martinez…

Did that have something to do with this slaughter? Was Mr. Martinez someone important? Someone his fellow vampires thought should die? Adley backed up, closer to the conversation, wanting to know what these documents were. He’d started by only taking photos, but lately, his interest had piqued. What else could he find out? What more was going on in this vast, dirty city of his?