Dead to the World

A little eye makeup and some blush, and I was good to go.
    I’d parked at the rear of the house last night, and I checked the back porch carefully to make sure there weren’t any lurking vampires before I shut and locked the back door behind me. I’d been surprised before, and it wasn’t a pleasant feeling. Though it was barely dark, there might be some early risers around. Probably the last thing the Japanese had expected when they’d developed synthetic blood was that its availability would bring vampires out of the realm of legend and into the light of fact. The Japanese had just been trying to make a few bucks hawking the blood substitute to ambulance companies and hospital emergency rooms. Instead, the way we looked at the world had changed forever.
    Speaking of vampires (if only to myself), I wondered if Bill Compton was home. Vampire Bill had been my first love, and he lived right across the cemetery from me. Our houses lay on a parish road outside the little town of Bon Temps and south of the bar where I worked. Lately, Bill had been traveling a lot. I only found out he was home if he happened to come into Merlotte’s, which he did every now and then to mix with the natives and have some warm O-positive. He preferred TrueBlood, the most expensive Japanese synthetic. He’d told me it almost completely satisfied his cravings for blood fresh from the source. Since I’d witnessed Bill going into a bloodlust fit, I could only thank God for TrueBlood. Sometimes I missed Bill an awful lot.
    I gave myself a mental shake. Snapping out of a slump, that was what today was all about. No more worry! No more fear! Free and twenty-six! Working! House paid for! Money in the bank! These were all good, positive things.
    The parking lot was full when I got to the bar. I could see I’d be busy tonight. I drove around back to the employees’ entrance. Sam Merlotte, the owner and my boss, lived back there in a very nice double-wide that even had a little yard surrounded by a hedge, Sam’s equivalent of a white picket fence. I locked my car and went in the employees’ back door, which opened into the hallway off of which laid the men’s and the ladies’, a large stock room, and Sam’s office. I stowed my purse and coat in an empty desk drawer, pulled up my red socks, shook my head to make my hair hang right, and went through the doorway (this door was almost always propped open) that led to the big room of the bar/restaurant. Not that the kitchen produced anything but the most basic stuff: hamburgers, chicken strips, fries and onion rings, salads in the summer and chili in the winter.
    Sam was the bartender, the bouncer, and on occasion the cook, but lately we’d been lucky in getting most of our positions filled.
    The new cook was just a regular human, as far as I knew. She’d shown up in answer to Sam’s ad just the week before. Cooks didn’t seem to stay long at Merlotte’s, but I was hoping that Sweetie Des Arts would stick around a while. She showed up on time, did her job well, and never gave the rest of the staff any trouble. Really, that was all you could ask for. Our last cook, a guy, had given my friend Arlene a big rush of hope that he was The One—in this case, he’d have been her fourth or fifth One—before he’d decamped overnight with her plates and forks and a CD player. Her kids had been devastated; not because they’d loved the guy, but because they missed their CD player.
    I walked into a wall of noise and cigarette smoke that made it seem like I was passing into another universe. Smokers all sit on the west side of the room, but the smoke doesn’t seem to know it should stay there. I put a smile on my face and stepped behind the bar to give Sam a pat on the arm. After he expertly filled a glass with beer and slid it to a patron, he put another glass under the tap and began the process all over again.
    “How are things?” Sam asked carefully. He knew all about Jason’s problems, since he’d been with me the night I’d found Jason being held prisoner in a toolshed in Hotshot. But we had to be roundabout in our speech; vampires had gone public, but shape-shifters and Weres were still cloaked in secrecy. The underground world of supernatural beings was waiting to see how vampires fared before they followed the vampire example by going public.
    “Better than I expected.” I smiled up at him, though not too far up, since Sam’s not a big man. He’s built lean, but he’s much