“A long time ago, I dunno,” he said. His grasp of these things, like of so many others, was incomplete.
She looked up at the tunnel’s ceiling. Water dripped around them, slipping through tiny cracks. It was cold and humid below, but Domingo didn’t mind, he peeled layers on or off as necessary.
“How did you find it?” she asked.
“I was looking for a ghost station.”
Atl chuckled, her voice echoing around them.
“Not like scary ghosts. Seriously. There are supposed to be abandoned stations down here. There’s one that is used by soldiers, like a secret one. And one is near a subterranean lake. I’ve never found the lake, though.”
He jumped over a puddle and turned around to offer Atl his hand, but she needed no assistance and evaded it with the ease of a dancer, landing next to him and giving him a smirk.
“It probably doesn’t exist,” she said.
“Well, I’m not sure. There are all kinds of weird things beneath the city. I know a guy who said they once found an abandoned bag on one of the trains and there was a human fetus inside. And there are rats. There’s this huge rat that hangs around near La Merced. It’s bigger than a dog.”
“Maybe it’s a dog.”
“It has yellow glowy eyes.”
“Well, then, that’s scientific proof,” Atl said, sounding amused.
“You sound really skeptical for a vampire.”
She smirked once more. “It’s probably because I am a vampire.”
They reached Domingo’s chamber and he hurried in, quickly illuminating the room with several of his lanterns. He had a lot of stuff, but he tried to keep it in order. There was his pile of clothes, a pile of plastic, a pile of old electric parts. Atl drifted toward the wall covered with illustrations from books and magazines. It was random clippings. Pretty girls mixed with funny drawings. Panels of Tarzan hovered next to a postcard of a painted ocean, which was the closest he’d been to a beach.
Atl leaned down to look at the image of the vampire woman in the white dress, and he felt himself blushing, feeling foolish.
“Dracula’s Mistress,” she said, reading the title out loud. “How Gothic.”
“I … I’ve read comics about vampires of that sort,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck with his left hand. “The ones that turn to mist. Of course, you don’t turn to mist.”
“No one turns to mist. That’s just stuff they tell kids to sell shit.”
“It sounds cool,” Domingo said. “Plus the whole harem.”
Vampires in the stories were hyper rich. They got to live in castles and had lots of servants. They were mesmerizing. And there had to be an element of truth to the stories because Atl did have money and she wasn’t nowhere near ugly.
Atl sat down on a plastic chair and leaned back, stretching her legs, her lips curving into a dismissive smile. “A harem?”
“Vampire guys have lots of babes with them. Dracula has three, four, probably more than that. Lavud also has a few. Your vampire men, the ones like you, they must be good with the ladies.”
“There’s no vampire men like me. Men of my subspecies don’t shift form, they’re weaker, and they live shorter life spans than the women. I guess you could call it a sex-linked disorder.”
“Oh. But still, I mean, do you have a guy back home?”
“No,” Atl said, picking up a graphic novel and thumbing through it. “No vampire women, either.”
Domingo felt better hearing that. For a moment he had been afraid there was a big vampire dude waiting for her, in a cape. Okay, maybe not a cape. A leather jacket. Though he found it hard to believe that vampire men or, you know, women, were not all over her.
“Yeah. I know how it goes. I used to have a girlfriend but that’s not the case anymore,” he told her because he figured it sounded like the mature thing to say. He was attempting to go for “aloof” and “sophisticated,” like they said in the magazines.
Atl stretched her arms up, as if reaching for the ceiling, and yawned, tilting her head. “Hey, just so we are clear: I’m not looking for a boyfriend. Especially not a human one.”
“I didn’t mean it like that,” Domingo stammered.
Though maybe he did mean it a little like that.
“Just in case,” she said, staring at him.
An uncomfortable silence descended upon them. Just when he thought they had a rhythm to their conversation going. Domingo chewed on his lower lip, racking his brains for something to say. Something to pull Atl back, something that would be interesting.
Domingo wanted to be interesting but he didn’t have much to say. He could tell her about the garbage, how the business of being a binner works, how you find stuff and sell it for scrap. It was the only thing he really knew a lot about. That, and comic books. ’Cause his stories, about the ghost station and the big rat, sure as hell didn’t seem to interest her.
He wanted to tell her something that didn’t make him seem like such a kid.
“Have you killed anyone?” he blurted.
“Enough,” Atl said, pushing herself up. “Well, I did your tour. I should head back to my apartment.”