Bite Me

minute.”
    Jared let the heavy dagger drop to the floor, climbed to his feet, winced, then limped off to the bathroom to look for toothpaste.
    He located a tube of all natural tartar control with baking soda just as the sun dropped under the horizon in the west. Out in the living room, a needle-thin stream of mistbegan leaking out of the gash he’d made in the bronze statue. Toothpaste probably wouldn’t have fixed it.
    THE ANIMALS
    In the last two months, the Animals, the night stock crew at the Marina Safeway, had hunted an ancient vampire, blown up his yacht, stolen millions of dollars’ worth of art, sold it for pennies on the dollar, spent the remaining hundreds of thousands on gambling and a blue hooker, got turned into vampires, were torn apart by zoo animals, then burned up by sunlamps when they attacked Abby Normal, then turned, by Foo, back into seven guys who stocked shelves at the Safeway and smoked a little too much weed. And as it often is with adventurers, after the adventure, they were feeling a little bored, and a little worried that nothing exciting would ever happen to them again.
    After you’ve battled the darkness, then become the darkness, then shagged the darkness, frozen turkey bowling and skiing behind the floor-scrubbing machine just doesn’t hold the same thrill. After you’ve shared a blue prostitute with your buddies to the tune of a half a million dollars, only to have her kill and resurrect you before disappearing into the night, swapping stories of banging babes was a bit of an anticlimax. After all, they worked nights and the oldest of them, Clint, was only twenty-three, so most of their stories were gross exaggerations, wishful thinking, or outright lies anyway. Even crucifying Clint with zipties on the potato chip rack every other Friday didn’t seem fun anymore, and last week they had just left him hanging, thrashing in the Doritos, and went off to stock their aisles before he could even forgive them for knowing not what they did. Tragic, really, to be young, free, and mind-numbingly bored.
    So when the Emperor of San Francisco came screaming out of the parking lot and slammed, face-first, into the big Plexiglas front window, rattling the Tic Tacs on every register, each of them dropped what he was working on and headed to the front of the store, hoping in their hearts that something outstanding was coming down.
    The seven, the Animals, stood on one side of the big window, while the Emperor pounded on the other, the royal hounds leaping and barking at his side.
    “Maybe we should let him in,” said Clint, curly-haired, born-again, ex–heroin addict who worked cereal, coffee, and juices. “He seems troubled.”
    “ Sí, ” said Gustavo, the porter, leaning on his mop. “Troubled.”
    “Seems fucking freaked,” said Drew, the Ichabod-Crane-gaunt master of the frozen food aisle and chief medical officer. “Totally fucking freaked.”
    “What’s wrong?” asked Lash, the lean black guy who had become their leader when Tommy was turned into a vampire, largely because he almost had an MBA, but also because he was a black guy and inherently cooler than everyone else.
    “Murder, destruction, ravenous creatures of the night, a storm of them,” shouted the Emperor. “Hurry, please.”
    “He always says that,” said Barry, the balding fireplug of a scuba diver who also stocked soap and dog food.
    “Well, every time he says it, it’s kind of true,” said Jeff, the tall blond ex–power forward with the blown-out knee (baking supplies and international foods). “I say let him in.”
    “Look, the retriever is all bandaged up. Poor guy,” said Troy Lee, their resident martial arts expert who worked the glass aisle. “Let them in.”
    “You just want to roll the little one up in a burrito,” said Lash.
    “Yeah, that’s right, Lash. Because I’m Chinese, I have a deep-seated need to nosh house pets. Now why don’t you let him in before my inner Chinaman forces me to kung-fu your bitch ass.”
    Because he understood that he was the leader only so long as he told everyone to do what they wanted to do anyway, and because he had had his bitch ass kung-fued in the past and hadn’t cared for it, Lash unlocked the door and let the Emperor in.
    The old man fell into the store when Lash opened the door. Bummer and Lazarus stopped barking and bolted by them, and on toward the back of the store.
    Jeff and Drew got the Emperor seated on one of the registers and Troy Lee