Annie of the Undead Read online

  Annie of the Undead

  Varian Wolf

  Smashwords Edition

  Copyright 2012 Varian Wolf

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and events are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance of characters to persons living or deceased is purely coincidental.

  This book is dedicated to my excellent friend Christina and to the people of New Orleans.

  Special thanks to Nicole Tracey Prestin for her editing prowess, Ashley Taylor for her striking cover design, Charlie Cummings for his varied technical assistance and overall adorableness, Heather K. Wilson-Miller for being Annie for an hour, and Josh Kaufman and family for putting me up in their home in the heart of New Orleans.

  Many thanks to Christina Power, Nicole Tracey Prestin, and Thomas Prestin for test reading.

  Thanks to the folks at Smashwords for making this publication possible.

  Cover art copyright 2013 Varian Wolf

  Cover art and design by Ashley Taylor

  Thanks and love to Chinook Wolf for foot warming, cuddles service, and her nearly infinite patience.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1 – Every Story Starts Somewhere

  Chapter 2 – Never Swoon (or How to Attract a Vampire)

  Chapter 3 – Enter Vampire

  Chapter 4 – Trust

  Chapter 5 – Due South

  Chapter 6 – Breathing

  Chapter 7 – Gay Hippies

  Chapter 8 – Shittin’ Kittens

  Chapter 9 – Silence is a Virtue

  Chapter 10 – Wrecked to Hell

  Chapter 11 – Yell Fire

  Chapter 12 – Walking Against the Wind

  Chapter 13 – Death is the Maiden

  About the Author

  Connect with Varian online

  1

  Every Story Starts Somewhere

  “Which way do you want it, puta? In the ass or in the pussy?”

  The bitch who called herself Diva held the spoon she’d smuggled out of the canteen with the smug air of someone holding a real weapon.

  “I’m gonna stick it up you, puta, you two-tone trash. And what are you gonna do about it? Huh? You all alone now. Ain’t no bulls around to protect you.”

  So Diva had finally gotten me alone –if you call her and two of her ugliest bitches alone. We’d been inside together for months and she hadn’t managed to do it –not since that first night when she and her thugs and I had been discussing the finer points of raping me, and we were interrupted by a guard. Yes, folks, that happens in jail. If you’re a sorority girl on a one-night public-drunkenness-after-the-football-game foray into our lovely penal system, it’s just as possible that you will get something stuck where the sun don’t shine as it is for people like me –I mean, like I was. The guards had broken us up twice since that first episode, going for each other’s throats, but this secluded corner was a place where shit could actually go down. I wondered which one of the guards had helped her to make it happen, letting her and her lieutenants down the hall to the showers when they knew I was already down here, getting the jail funk off me before being released later in the day, when doing so was like dropping a match into a powder keg –or sending rats down a rattlesnake hole.

  There was some question as to who the guard was trying to fuck, me or them.

  “She wants it in the ass, Diva,” screeched the skinny bitch beside her, “That’s the way little Hamtramck putas like her take it.”

  I wasn’t actually from Hamtramck, but one shithole’s as good as another.

  “Look around, puta,” Diva spread her flabby arms. “You see a way out? You see your salvation?”

  “Fuckin’ Catholic.”

  “What did you say?”

  I looked back and forth from the skinny bitch on the left, the ugly-bat-beat bitch on the right, and the corpulent one in the middle with six inches of roots showing above a bad dye job to tell of the twelve-months she’d been inside.

  “Fuckin’ religion gives me indigestion. Can we just get on with this?”

  Diva scowled at me, the expression doing the worst possible things with what gravity and years had made of her face. She was maybe forty, but the poorly-maintained kind of forty. She wasn’t street-worn. She had long since given up her years on the street hustling for some gang, and taken up some of the cushier occupations of the urban antisocial. She was currently in on a variety of soft charges including identity theft and fraud. Business must have been good; I never saw so many chins.

  All the droopy flab had to radically reorient when her scowl turned to a laugh.

  “What, you gonna try some of that boxing shit on me? Let’s see what you got, little puta, before I cut you a bigger one.”

  “You cut the Grand Canyon, and it’ll still be smaller than your mama’s.”

  “Puta!”

  With that, Diva lunged at me. The your-mamas can usually be trusted to elicit that response. I didn’t meet her head-on. She was a big girl, maybe six feet tall and pushing three bills, but she was all flab and no finesse. I just let her careen on past, and I hit the ugly one in the liver a couple of times, getting that satisfying pain-grunt out of her before turning to Mina, the skinny one.

  Mina was quicker than the other two and a scrapper, but she didn’t know how to dance. I feinted right and nailed her with a left hook on the chin. It was no haymaker, but she went straight to the floor like a wet noodle. Glass jaw.

  I was grabbed from behind. Diva had turned on me quicker than I had anticipated. She took hold of my shirt. The much-hyped spoon went immediately out of play, falling to the floor.

  I tried to twist out of her grasp, but only succeeded in nearly throttling myself. She was hanging on like a bloated tick. I elbowed her hard in what I thought was the gut, but she was huge, and her fat absorbed the blow.

  Then the ugly one was coming for me. Diva shouted instructions at her, and she tried to grab my legs. I doubled up and, using the bloated one for leverage, kicked out hard with both legs. I nearly missed but caught Ugly in the arm with one foot, sending her staggering backwards.

  Now Diva was trying to choke me, which wasn’t the worst of it. She was cursing indecipherably and spitting in my hair as she did so, which was. The fro-like entity that lived on my head may have been a mess already and in need of all kinds of salon intervention, but you don’t mess with a girl’s bush. You just don’t.

  Choking, I punched at Diva’s head behind me, but she was too tall for the effort to be effective. Then I just grabbed for whatever I could and twisted savagely. It only felt like flab, but she cried out in pain.

  Just then Ugly punched me in the face.

  It was a square blow, delivered as hard as Ugly could punch. She was a stocky girl in her twenties, with forearms as big as those of the average man her height. The blow was jarring, probably more so under the circumstances than it would have been on its own –I had this little oxygen problem at the moment. I tasted blood in my mouth, and my lips stung over my teeth. Chick could hit.

  But I knew how to be hit. While Ugly was doing the shit-that-hurt-my-hand dance that people do who aren’t used to meeting bare knuckles with bone, I was doing my damnedest to gouge Diva’s eyes out. They were b
uried deep in the fat of her face, but, with the added freedom of her weakening grip, I had finally located them. I would blind the bitch. I wouldn’t think twice about it, and Diva knew it.

  Diva let me go, or shoved me away from her, rather. I went sprawling, gasping for air. As I started to get up, somebody kicked me in the ribs. I went down again. Someone tried to kick me again, but I grabbed her by the ankle and pulled as hard as I could. Diva hurtled down like a tractor-trailer going over an overpass. Floor met flab with a loud smack, sending waves rolling over the fat sea, and all the air out of her lungs.

  I got to my feet and hit Ugly with a combination to the midsection and face. Then I kicked Diva twice in the head. Then I hit Ugly some more. I beat her right down to the ground, and she stayed there.

  Diva was struggling to get up. Her nose was bleeding. She was breathing hard from exertion. The bigger they are, the harder it is for them to get up.

  I picked up the threatened-with spoon that Diva had dropped during the fracas. I got down on the floor beside her, put my arm around her neck, and jabbed the handle end of the spoon into her ear. I held her there.

  She inhaled sharply when she realized the position she was in.

  “Where do you want it, bitch? In the eye or in the ear?”

  “No! No!” she yelled. “You’re loca! Loca!”

  Ugly lay dazed on the floor, and, just beyond her, Mina was moaning herself into wakefulness.

  “I’m supposed to get out today. How the fuck am I supposed to do that now? Today was my release. Do you hear me, you fuckin’ bitch? My goddamned release.”

  “I hear you!” Diva shouted at my shaking her, “Please, just don’t…don’t…”

  “Don’t what? This?”

  I jabbed the spoon harder in. Diva squealed.

  “I gotta stay in here over this –over you, it ain’t gonna be for love taps. I want a pound of flesh,” I pushed the spoon again, “From right here.”

  “No! Please!” she wailed, “This didn’t happen! I swear to you. We won’t say anything.”

  “Don’t you fuckin’ lie to me. I’ve got a spoon in your ear, remember.”

  “No! Don’t! Maria, tell her you won’t say nothing. She has nothing to worry about. Tell her!”

  Ugly Maria looked irritated. She wasn’t very bright, but she was bright enough to know that the person she had looked at as a leader had been reduced to utter spinelessness and was now asking the same of her.

  “There’s spoon for you too if you ask for it,” I warned her.

  Maria looked at me then, considering.

  “I won’t say nothing.”

  She wasn’t that stupid after all.

  I turned my attention back to Diva.

  “You don’t want me in here. If I stay, we finish this. You want me gone.”

  “Gone, yes. You’re already gone. You’re gone today. Just go away,” Diva affirmed.

  But I didn’t move. I crouched there, spoon in fist, considering. Killing this bitch would make me feel all warm inside, and what was waiting for me on the outside? The streets of rotting old Detroit, a parole officer, all the enemies I’d made, the unemployment of the previously incarcerated, a boxing career interrupted by half a dozen stints on the inside –it was nothing to look forward to. And the alternative? State lockup. I’d been there before. It didn’t have the chaos of jail, the frequently altering population as people got arrested, sentenced or released, and arrested again, the sleeping on the floor when overpopulation and underfunding of the local penal system maxed out the number of beds, the constantly reevaluating how big you are in an ever-changing pool of angry little fish. Maybe that was Diva’s problem. She’d do better in the pen where the rigid social hierarchy would keep her in check, providing her powers and people to pick on, as well as people to be afraid of. Diva would do well in a place like that, in society.

  I, on the other hand, wanted no part of it.

  I left the spoon in her ear and stood up. Diva didn’t move. She just laid there looking up at me. Maybe she was afraid I would change my mind. Maybe I would.

  The other two were staring at me, Mina with the dazed expression of someone who has missed the whole thing, but who can see from the circumstances that things have gone very wrong.

  “You’d better go wash up,” I said.

  I spat blood at their feet, then turned and left.

  “Angry Annie,” said Fred, a guard, when he saw me emerge from the door to the hall. He looked startled.

  “Surprised to see me?”

  “No,” he lied. “You look like you hit your lip on something. Did you slip in the shower?”

  “I ran into something…ugly.”

  “I hope you don’t take it personal,” he said. “Things happen around here.”

  “It’s nothing,” I said after a moment. “As long as it stays nothing.”

  “If you say it’s nothing, it’s nothing,” he said, sounding relieved. “Why don’t you go get some ice from the canteen to put on that lip? People might ask questions if you let it swell up.”

  “Never knew you could be so friendly. Guess I should have run into something sooner.”

  Fred was a manipulative bastard and a troublemaker. He’d had his eye on me from the start. He knew I was a troublemaker too. We can smell each other –troublemakers, not bastards. Bastards smell the same as everybody else.

  He shrugged at me.

  “You better get out of here.”

  I obeyed because ice sounded nice right now, not because he was a guard, was six-foot-two, and had a taser. He let me pass because he’d satiated his current thirst for trouble, and because a little more might not be the kind he wanted. He had the law behind him, making the action seem like generosity rather than the calculation that it was.

  Fuckin’ politics. We had elected sons of bitches on the outside, and shits like Fred on the inside. Every shithole has to have its politicians. The only thing I hated more than preachers was politicians –and Pit Bulls. Hate those too –and the Insane Clown Posse, and those little paper cups that you’re supposed to squirt full of ketchup. I couldn’t wait to get out and have to face those things again. Fuckin’ little things…

  I first discovered the world of the bloodthirsty undead on the day I was released from jail. All the clichés played out before our eyes on television and on the pages of trashy novels hold true: it is a world of macabre seduction, decadent revelry, ancients so beautiful it hurts your eyes to look at them, power in its oldest form, and of course, egregious night-stalking, throat-ripping, violence. That is to say, it suited me just fine.

  As you have seen, I wasn’t then the empathetic, socialized, companionable individual you’d meet today. That Annie might have more happily exchanged a knife in your kidney for your wallet than a ‘hello’ for your ‘how do you do’. That Annie, “Angry” Annie Eastwood, had issues. But I’m much better now, thanks to vampires, voodoo queens, and assorted other individuals of supernatural affiliation, as you will see in a bit.

  Election Day is the climax of this my first foray into that crazy world, but the story begins on the earlier date of October first, the day I decided not to ram a plastic spoon into someone’s brain and was subsequently spat by the penal system back onto the dirty streets of Detroit City. If I had not laid down my spoon, I never would have met my vampire, never would have left Michigan or moved south, and never would have gotten into all the bloodsucking nonsense. I never would have swum the Big Muddy with the gators in the middle of the night, never would have driven a wooden table leg through anybody’s heart, and I never would have found myself half naked on a bathroom floor next to a dead Spanish guy with my shirt wrapped around his head –okay, maybe that last part might have happened eventually anyway –but, point is, it’s the little decisions that can change your life.

  Now don’t start looking down your nose at me. I still reserve the right to put that blade in your kidney, or something worse.

  Later that day, I was called for release processi
ng.

  I made kissy faces as I walked passed Diva. She tried not to look like I had beat the shit out of her a couple hours before. She had a reputation to maintain. She was going to be in there a while.

  The guards were happy to see me go, even if it was to freedom and not to do hard time. I had worked to ensure that this group of jail hawks respected me. I figured the more strong-arming they had to use on me in the beginning the scarier I was. Yep, five-foot-five, one-hundred-forty-five-pound Annie Eastwood: the Big Bad.

  The guards didn’t strong-arm me as they led me out to the room where the wide woman with the hair growing out of her mole would give me my belongings, the last staging area between incarceration and the freedom to get incarcerated again. They sort of kept their distance. I wasn’t worth the trouble that pissing me off would cause. If there was an altercation, we might just be stuck with each other for a while longer. Yeah, keep back, you under-educated, dead-end-career power-trippers.

  The wide woman’s big mole was particularly moley today.

  She shoved a familiar triplicate layer cake in front of me under her protective window. On top of the stack was a plastic bag containing a black sport bra, a crushed box of Marlboros, and nothing else. I looked at her.

  “Where’s the rest of my stuff?”

  She looked at my paperwork, then through her glasses at me unsympathetically.

  “You came in with an unregistered Ruger, half a box of .40 caliber bullets, and a pair of jean shorts so nasty they had to be incinerated. You aren’t getting any of that back, Miss Eastwood.”

  “You’re telling me that you would send a girl out onto the street in the middle of downtown Detroit in this outfit without a firearm?”

  “Take it easy, Eastwood,” said one of the guards.

  “We have some clothes for you to change into,” said the Mole. “Now go put your bra on.”