HE HAD BEEN right, he thought, on the long bike trip home: getting low on blood was like being drunk. Drunk and hungry. Being drunk and dry at the same time must feel terrible, he thought. Drunk but sanguine—that felt a little better. He let his bike drift from side to side, giving in to the weightlessness, softening his eyes until everything was smoke and blurred edges. Then he was nearly clipped by a car.
“Dumbass!” shouted a boy riding shotgun.
“Nice poncho!” shouted a kid in the back.
Screw you, thought Doug. This poncho is for safety. You’re supposed to wear white when you bike at night. I shouldn’t even have to explain this to you, but I do because you’re all a bunch of fuck-wit future short-order cooks. You’re a bunch of burger flippers. You’re a bunch of batter-dipped fry guys, he thought. Besides, it was easier to just wear the poncho than try to fit it in his pocket.
He ramped up onto the sidewalk and gazed into the park, through the hedges and tall trees, the statuary, the…deer.
There was a deer in the park. A West Philadelphia park, empty at night but for a man asleep on a bench and, over there, a deer. Doug stopped his bike. The deer, which may have been watching him pass, turned and stepped unhurriedly toward the far road. Doug trundled his bike around and pedaled back to a gap in the hedge, then into the park. The deer answered by bounding across the street to the south park, its hooves drawing a crisp, thrilling percussion out of the cracked pavement. Doug stood up on his pedals, shifted gears, and chased.
The night made him strong. He could feel it seep into his legs, an eldritch power, his prize and his curse, gained in a dark bargain with shadowy forces that he may better exact his vengeance on…this deer. Maybe he could pretend the deer was a mugger.
It dashed through the children’s playground, and in that spray of sand and Tinkertoy architecture he lost it. At the far edge of the park he slowed and looked around.
There was a bewildered-looking guy on the sidewalk, and Doug asked, “Did you just see—”
“Yeah, man!” he answered, and pointed down a side street. “It went that way!” Doug thanked him and pushed off again.
Where had this deer come from? The closest real woodland was a few miles away, and even that was just a thin, fresh strip between two scabrous counties. Like Mother Nature had left her watch on while getting tattooed. It was too unlikely, seeing a deer here. Doug inflated the unlikelihood of it in his soggy mind until it was like mythology, until it seemed to him that the deer could be nothing short of a spiritual messenger or a gift. To catch it would signify something. In the fantasy sorts of stories Doug read the deer would have something important to tell him. Or he would trade its life for a wish. Or maybe it would actually be a beautiful woman, bound to him forever. If this last possibility strikes you as odd, then you have probably never been a teenage boy. There are an uncatalogable number of things that can remind a teenage boy of beautiful women.
The side street ended at a T, and Doug could see nothing in either direction. The deer was somewhere close, he thought. Hiding. He drew a deep breath through his nostrils and not so much smelled as sensed something wild in the air.
Near the T in the road was a gravel path between two houses, too narrow for a car, not quite a driveway. Doug left his bike by the street and crept up the path, conscious that he was approaching a strange house, ducking past a strange window, but the smell was overwhelming. The smell and a rhythmic, chuffing sound like a locomotive. He reached the end of the path. Crouching low, he craned his head around the corner, and the deer was there.
Large. Larger than he expected. It was looking slightly downward at him, fenced in by a postage-stamp backyard, no more than three feet away. Its mouth was white with dry spit. Its belly kept time like a huge, fiercely beating heart.
It was difficult holding it down, but Doug was strong tonight. And after a minute the animal grew calm. Its breathing slowed. Its blood was so much better than cow’s blood, though not as satisfying as human. Still, there was an electricity to this feed that made even those bags of human blood seem a little like dead batteries.
He took more than he usually did. He took as much as he could.
He got a little of it on his poncho, but it wiped clean. That was the nice thing about vinyl.
The deer would never have found its way back home. The deer would have been shot by animal control, or got hit by a car. The deer might have hurt someone.
He was back on track now, tearing through the streets on his bicycle, his body warm and mighty. Was it the blood (or maybe the alcohol?) that made him feel both larger and smaller than himself? Like he was wearing a costume. Like he was looking at the world through eyeholes, narrowly. He really wished he could run into those guys in that car again. Those guys, or some just like them. Any guys, really.
There was a long way home and a very long way home, and Doug took the latter tonight, through streets that began to split and crumble beneath his tires, past the stumps of trees that had been cut down and made into posters for beer and cigarettes. He was looking for a little trouble, but it was only seven o’clock and barely dark, and a short white kid on a bike didn’t attract the sort of negative attention he thought it would. So he’d already crossed the street that formed the abrupt and almost mystical barrier between the have-nots and the haves, and was nearing his own neighborhood, when he accepted that he just couldn’t hold it any longer and pulled up to a MoPo convenience store to pee.
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d urinated. It just wasn’t something he needed to do much anymore. Was it because of the liquor? Alcohol made you pee, right? Or maybe because he’d taken too much blood from the deer.
Man, the deer. That whole episode already seemed so dreamlike, so long ago. He could almost wonder if it even really happened. But he could still smell the animal on his clothes and the blood on his poncho. And he was strong.
He locked his bike to the rack and pushed through the door of the empty MoPo, into the skim milk light, the smell of pretzels and freezer burn.
“Bathroom?” he asked the checkout girl.
“By the dairy case,” she answered without looking up from her acrylic nails.
Doug minced through the faintly spinning store and found the bathroom. If he really did need to pee because he’d taken too much from the deer, did that mean he was about to piss blood? His stomach lurched at the idea, but when he finally unclenched the fist he’d made of his crotch, the only thing that splashed against the urinal was urine. He pumped his free hand victoriously in the air.
He washed up and glanced at his reflection in the mirror. Then he took a long look. Here was a nice-looking guy staring back at him. Doug couldn’t quite place the face.
He retraced his steps through a swinging plastic door between the dairy case and the bottled water and found the MoPo a lot busier. There were two men near the checkout island and a third standing by the entrance with his hand over the lock. One of the men was pointing a toy gun at the cashier.
No, a real gun, Doug thought as he struggled to decode the situation.
These guys are robbing the MoPo. Oh, hell yeah!
This was important, the culmination of his origin story. This would be momentous. Don’t think, he thought. Don’t think.
He unbuttoned his poncho and pulled the hood over his head as he strode toward the men, arms akimbo. The cashier was fumbling underneath the register drawer. “All of it! All of it!” the armed man shouted. An unarmed man between Doug and the gunman saw him approach.
“Roy,” he said, with a big-eyed frown.
“Hey!” said Roy. “No names! And, besides, uh, that’s not my—” He flinched and turned the gun on Doug. “Who the fuck is this?! Chad, out of the way!”
“Now he said your name, Chad,” said the man by the door.
“You’ve picked the wrong convenience store tonight, gentlemen,” Doug announced in what he thought was an intimidatingly low rumble, like distant thunder. Too distant, possibly.
“What? Man, back off!” said Chad. With outstretched arms he threw all his weight into Doug. Doug sprawled backward, clutching at the counter, anything, to steady himself, to no avail. He was dumped backward onto the floor along with a clattering hot-dog cooker. Time slowed. The situation presented itself with intricate clarity.
“Just stay down!” the cashier shouted. “Let these men go!”
Doug said, “HOT DOGS!” and whipped a handful of the sweaty wieners at Chad’s face. Afterward, he wasn’t sure why he’d shouted it.
“Aah! Hey!” Chad screeched through upraised hands.
“Man, move!” Roy shouted as he pushed Chad aside, but when he raised his gun, Doug hurled the steel hot-dog warmer at his head. Roy fired at the stained dropped ceiling and went down.
The noise of the gun was deafening. Doug had never been so close to one before, and his ears went tinny. But it roused him off the floor and toward a snack display.
“POP-TARTS! POP-TARTS! POP-TARTS!” he shouted, throwing twin packs of them like shurikens at the heads and throats of all three men. Again with the shouting, he thought. He was reading too many Silver Age comic books.
Chad came close and threw a punch, but Doug found it surprisingly easy to dodge. Then he returned the punch, and Chad folded backward over the snack foods and didn’t get back up. “Ha!” said Doug, then ducked when he realized he was being shot at.
“Roy, let’s just go!” said the man at the door.
“MAGAZINE RACK ATTACK!” yelled Doug, deciding to just go with it. He swung the rack over his head and onto Roy’s, and the man collapsed in a heap. All around them celebrity magazines and sudoku booklets flapped heavily like chickens and then slumped dead to the floor. The cashier was just finishing up a scream. Doug looked over at the doorman, the doorman looked back at Doug. Then he unlocked the door and ran out into the night.
“He won’t get far!” Doug promised, and followed. His poncho billowed out behind him like a great white sail, a sail borne on the winds of justice. That would be a good name for him, he thought, as he narrowed in on his prey: White Justice. No, it sounded a little neo-Nazi. He might as well call himself Nordic Lightning. You can have black superheroes with “Black” at the beginning of their names, but you can’t really do it with white superheroes. “Jewish Justice” just sounds like a law firm, he thought, before noticing he was about to get hit by a trolley.