"What?" said Cat. "What’s wrong?"
"Ganesha is in the bag I…lost," Sejal said.
"Ganesha…Is that the god with the elephant head?"
Sejal thought of her little pink Ganesha figurine in her big pink bag, turning slowly on the dull airport merry-go-round. She nodded.
"The airport lost your elephant god," said Cat.
Both girls slumped onto the bed.
"Asswipes."
6
Plasma TV
TV’S ALAN FRIENDLY strode down the corridor of Belfry Studios, a DVD in his hand. Occasionally he pumped this hand in the air, watching the light glint dazzlingly off the disk’s iridescent grooves. This would look good on tape, Alan thought. He wished someone were taping him. Someone usually was.
He hosted a hit basic cable television show called Vampire Hunters on which, over the course of two and a half seasons, they had not only failed to ever successfully hunt a vampire but also failed to collect adequate proof that such a thing even existed. And yet people watched. Every week, their numbers were as good as the weaker network shows, even in reruns. It was all a lot of stumbling around in the dark, filming everything with those green night-vision cameras, hanging around New Orleans nightclubs when there were no leads to take them elsewhere. So many false alarms with wealthy homosexuals and goth kids, never any legitimate bloodsucking anything, and still the nation watched. It had made Alan feel invincible, like he could put anything on television and make money. Miniature Bigfoot Hunters. Sixteen-Foot-Tall Invisible Robot Hunters.
Then came the Saturday Night Live skit thing. Last Saturday’s host, Cody Southern, had once starred in an 80’s teen vampire picture (Love Bites, 1987, starring Cody Southern and Cody Meyer) that had become the sort of movie that was on TV every Saturday afternoon your whole life. So the SNL writers and cast cooked up a Vampire Hunters parody in which a fake Alan and his team followed the real-life Cody everywhere — to the dry cleaners, to his kid’s piano recital, always impotently waving crosses and garlic in his face and trying to stake him.
It shouldn’t have been important. There was a school of thought (and a school of thought that Alan had been hearing a lot lately, especially from the people who worked for him) that said getting spoofed on SNL was a good thing — it proved that they’d arrived, that the country was talking about them. And the following week they had their best viewer share ever. But the week after that they had their second worst. And that was the same week that Alan lost a sponsor. That was the week an anchor on TV Now! said his name like it had quotes around it. That was the week his coproducers started looking like they’d awoken abruptly from a confusing dream in which they had, for some reason, financed a man with a vampire-hunting show based on little more than the fact that he had an English accent and his own stake.
But that was old news. The DVD made it old news.
"Ha-ha!" Alan trumpeted as he entered Props. "I have it! The news affiliate sent it over this morning."
Mike didn’t look up from his workbench. "I’ve already seen it on YouTube," he said.
"Not like this. Not like this. The quality is much better. Look."
Mike flinched as if Alan had slipped a wet finger into his ear, rather than a DVD into his laptop. "That better be clean," he said. "Nobody but me ever scans for viruses around here."
The video started itself. It looked down onto a concrete zoo enclosure and a sleeping panda. And a kid or a short man hunched over the panda. Seconds later there was the bang of a door and two more men appeared, and there was a struggle, and then a moment that was difficult to explain.
"There!" shouted Alan, thumping out the punctuation against the workbench, then cradling his bruised hand. "There."
Amid the tangle of bodies a shape had seemed to collapse in on itself and rise, flittering, into the air. Where there had once been three people, now there were only two zoo guards and what looked, conceivably, to be a bat. Especially if you wanted it to be a bat.
"There," Alan said again, gesturing at the monitor. "This is a big break. Before now we weren’t even sure a vampire would show up on tape."
"What do you mean? Why?"
"Because of the whole no-reflection thing. And some people claim they can’t be photographed."
"That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. Light either reflects off something or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, you wouldn’t be able to see the vampire with the naked eye, either."
"Well…" said Alan. He wasn’t used to having this sort of conversation about what he did. Most of his staff were fairly uncritical believers, or pretended to be. And until recently his coproducers hadn’t cared either way.
"And this is supposed to be the same person who stole some blood at a comics convention."
"He fits the description."
"Comics fan donors," Mike snorted. "That’s gotta be some watery blood." He pushed back his chair. "By the way, your Stake-O-Matic is done."
Alan squealed and leaned over Mike’s shoulder.
"It eats up a lot of compressed air," said Mike. "You’ll have to wear some kind of whippit bandolier."
It was a gun, there was no pussyfooting around that. It was a homemade air pistol with a wide, open barrel.
"It takes a standard three-quarter-inch dowel rod," said Mike. "Can stake a vampire-shaped thing at ten yards."
"Do you have any stakes already sharpened? I want to try it."
"I’m an applied sciences genius. I don’t whittle sticks. You want a stick whittled, find an intern."
"But it kills vampires?" asked Alan.
Mike sighed. "If vampires, like most people, don’t like getting things stuck in their hearts, then, yeah, okay. But if I really thought you were going to be aiming this thing at any vampires, I wouldn’t have made it in the first place. I’m envisioning a lot of footage of target practice at dummies with the word ‘vampire’ written in Sharpie."
"That footage says this kid is a vampire."
"That footage could have been faked. Are you kidding? I could have made that at home on my Mac. But if there are such things as vampires, it’s because they’re people with a disease or a disorder. Light sensitivity plus anemia, or something. Even if this kid is out there hurting people you’re not allowed to just go shooting things into his chest."
"If he’s…" said Alan, "if he’s a murderer, it’ll be justifiable."
"Sure. And Vampire Hunters will join the great tradition of television shows predicated on vigilante homicide. On-camera, vigilante homicide. Oh, wait — there aren’t any shows like that? I wonder why that is."
"Look," said Alan, "it’s not called Vampire Killers. It’s Vampire Hunters. We should be able to string out the hunt for this kid for at least five episodes. We’ll figure out what to do with him when we find him. But focus groups say they like our gear. Our tools. So we need more swag like the Stake-O-Matic. There are licensing possibilities."
"Whatever."
"Four more Stake-O-Matics just like this, plus another four for backups, plus we’re not calling them Stake-O-Matics anymore. They’re now called Redeemers."
"I don’t care."
"Also, I’m encouraging each crew member to name his personal Redeemer — maybe after an old girlfriend or something. But! The point is, the hunt is on! There’s a vampire in San Diego!"
"Sunny San Diego," said Mike.