Bite Me

it say?” Barry asked Troy Lee.
    “It says, ‘vampire cat remedy.’”
    “No shit?”
    “Yeah. Then there’s a bunch of warnings about side effects.”
    An hour later they were sitting around the Lee kitchen table, waiting for the big twenty-quart soup pot on the stove to come to a boil.
    Grandma Lee rose from her chair and tottered over to the stove with her package of herbs. Troy Lee joined her, helped her unwrap the package, and held the paper away from the burner as she scooped handfuls of herbs and animal parts into the boiling water. Foul and magical fumes bubbled out of the kettle, like the flatulence of dragons on a demon-only diet.
    “This really going to work, Grandma?” Troy Lee asked in Cantonese.
    “Oh yeah. We used it when I was a girl in China and some vampire cats invaded the city.”
    “And they still have the recipe in a shop down on Stockton Street?”
    “It’s a good recipe.” She scooped the last of the package into the water.
    “How do you use this stuff, anyway?”
    “With firecrackers.”
    “It’s wet, how are you going to use firecrackers?”
    “I don’t know how, I just like firecrackers.”
    The Animals covered their noses and started filing out of the kitchen. “That smells like fermented skunk ass,” said Jeff.
    Grandma said something in Cantonese, followed by“My bitches,” pronounced in frighteningly accentless English.
    “What? What’d she say?” asked Jeff.
    “She says, ‘That’s how you know it’s a good recipe, gents,’” said Troy Lee.
    THE EMPEROR
    A dark basement. A thousand sleeping vampire cats. One formerly human vampire. One huge, shaved vampire-cat hybrid. Five matches left. No way out. A half hour, maybe less, until sundown.
    The Emperor was not a man to use profanity, but after he assessed his situation and burned his fingers with his fourth to last match, he said, “Well, this blows.”
    There was no helping it, sometimes a man, even a brave and noble man, must speak the harsh truth, and his situation, did, indeed, blow.
    He’d tried everything he could think of to escape the basement, from building a stairway to the window with empty fifty-five-gallon drums, to screaming for help like a man on fire, but even on a platform of oil drums he couldn’t find the leverage or the strength to move the Dumpster away from the window.
    He could hear Bummer and Lazarus whimpering outside in the alley.
    All the other windows had been bricked up, all the steel fire doors were bolted, and, of course, the elevators andcables were long gone from the shafts (which he’d discovered after an hour prying the doors open with a metal support bar he’d taken off one of the shelves where Tommy Flood lay curled up with the Chet-thing). A dusty spray of twilight filtered down the elevator shaft from somewhere above, and it was by this that the Emperor ascertained that there was no way to climb the shaft, and that now it was dangerously close to sundown, as the light had turned a dim orange color.
    He would fight, oh yes, he would not go down without a battle, but even the magnificently agile little swordsman had gone down to the attacking pounce of cats. What chance did he stand in the dark with only a metal bar? He’d already checked the empty oil drums for accelerants, hoping he might burn his enemies before they awakened, but he’d had no luck. The barrels had had dry goods or something solid in them, and even so, he wasn’t sure how he’d avoid being suffocated by burning cat fumes.
    Then, in thinking about how he might escape the flames, it occurred to him how he might escape. He made his way back to the storeroom where Chet and Tommy lay, and lit one of his precious matches to get his bearings. Yes, there was still a bolt on the door, and in addition there were enough barrels and shelves to construct a barricade beyond that. The match went out and he felt his way across the room until he touched Tommy’s back—cold flesh. He took his ex-friend under the armpits and dragged him off the shelf and across the room, bumping through the door-way as he went. He shoved the body to the side and cringed with the crunch it made, falling onto the immobile bodies of dead cats.
    Back through dark, feeling around until he found Chet’s fur. He felt for what he thought were the front paws, then backed across the room again, the huge shaved vampire cat in tow. Chet was lighter than Tommy had been, but not by much, and the Emperor was winded. He couldn’t afford to