Sunrise On The Bricks by M. K. Dreysen

The nights are getting longer now; soon, fall will vanish into the next rotation.

I ask you, dear reader, to stay with me a little longer, here in the fall country. Where the monsters dwell.

Lucas Little is about to meet one. Or is it two?

Either way, first let's look to where Lucas finds himself, kneeling before the...

Sunrise On The Bricks by M. K. Dreysen

And the rumble of jets coming in overhead. They're headed in for wheels down and the ding and rattle of a plane full of cell phones reconnecting to the world.

While Lucas Little falls to his knees in the building shadow and vomits up three days worth of bile.

"Momma, what's that man doing?" he hears. From somewhere in the sunlight, Lucas hopes.

"You don't worry about that man," Momma tells the kid. And then Lucas hears only the traffic, and the rumbling in his gut. Threatening to throw out what's left. If there is anything to throw out and up.

****

When Lucas Little planned himself, he did it in pieces. Sanskrit "hope" on the back of his left elbow. Hebrew "heart" on the back of the left calf. Ra on the right and the winged serpent around his belly. Ink for these calls to a world forgotten.

Burns, brands, tracing alpha and omega on the inner right forearm. Lucas didn't know why he'd reserved that. Maybe he'd wanted to join a fraternity. Maybe he'd just enjoyed the way the ink looked, and then the way his own skin illustrated itself.

Blisters in brown and brown, shades of life. The way the scars felt under his fingers, when the blisters had set. Not like the tattoos, hell he'd never really have known they were there except for mirrors. The tattoos had no texture. But the brand, it called old nightmares and new into something that rested roped between his fingers if he pulled the skin just right.

The car had shown up last week. Just sitting there one afternoon; Lucas had had the morning part run. Figured he'd treat himself, so he stopped and actually sat at Rita's for a good lunch. One that didn't taste of grease and grit.

The Jag, XJ12, late series III... echoes of the TV show, Lucas couldn't remember the name of it but Denzel had done the movie later. Either way, Lucas grinned. The car wasn't black, instead that deep blue four doors and a rumble ready to fire up looking pretty damned good sitting in front of the shop.

"Who left their pride and joy for us to play with?" Lucas asked the shop.

Well, Gary. White kid from Pasadena, barely knew his elbow from a socket wrench when he started but Gary showed up early and stayed late. Lucas had hopes for Gary.

"Keys were in the slot this morning, with a note." Gary searched around the counter, held the note out when he found it.

Lucas took it, read the cursive request for help with Tara Washington's pride and joy. Lucas walked over to the window, to gauge the car against the writing.

Clean writing, old fashioned. But Lucas felt something strange about it. Almost like the note had come from a laser printer, a modern fake of the real thing. Lucas held the paper up to the light, wondering where the watermark hid.

When he found it, Lucas folded the note and walked back to the counter. "Why's it still sitting at the curb, then?"

Gary, grinning, held out the key. "You'll see."

Lucas took the key; he chalked the way his stomach dropped, and took a little of his balance and light with it, to Gary's grin. That had to be it, he told himself, nothing funny there just a V12 that didn't want to cooperate. And a joke at the old man's expense.

Either way, Lucas reminded himself, he still had to get the car off the street. Lucas had worked his tail off, building an old grocery warehouse one lift at a time into something. Leaving the old odd beauties to the street wouldn't do at all.

All the cars came in behind the brick and the metal doors because he had room for them. And because Lucas didn't want the neighbors, the ones with too much time and too big eyes, too interested in his something.

Lucas opened the big heavy door of the Jag, climbed into leather like a tomb's embrace, and wondered at his reaction. At the car's reaction, like it welcomed him to six foot under and a face full of dirt.

'Oh come on, fool. It's a sedan, not a hearse.' Lucas stared at the key, put it in and turned it over, and listened to the heavy chug of cylinders getting no spark at all. 'Shit.'

Lucas spent half an hour under the hood, fiddling with wires and the throttle body, before he convinced half the twelve cylinders to do as the Jaguar engineers had drawn it up and fire. And then he limped the big blue machine through the garage door and to an open work bay in the back of the garage.

Then, satisfied he'd at least taken casual vandalism out of the picture, Lucas hung the keys on the peg board and returned to the rest of his morning's work, getting his ancient Volkswagen half-truck unloaded. And fighting off the way his mind wanted to convince him he'd just stepped out of his own casket.

"What'd they load you down with this time?" Gary asked when Lucas dragged him out to shift boxes.

"Bunch of damned emergency kits. Flares, jumper cables."

"Everyone gets a free roadside kit for a while?"

Lucas snorted. Some hotshot had loaded the parts house up with freebies; every garage owner in Houston would be handing out emergency kits for a while. Lucas wouldn't have minded so much, except for all the unloading they meant just to get down to the XJ40 brake rotors and BMW 700 exhaust manifold that had caused the parts run in the first place.

When they'd shifted all the little red cases into a pile in the office, Lucas, Gary, and Pedro, Lucas's quiet second, spent the rest of the afternoon getting the rotors and the manifold where they needed to be.

Lucas figured he'd end up forgetting about the new addition, the blue beast slumbering in the back bay. Sure, he'd see the keys the next morning, on the peg board, but this afternoon he and Pedro had the parts and the work, and Gary to teach brakes to.

The big blue XJ should have hidden in the late winter shadows. Except somehow the sedan's weight lingered, in the air. Rolled out, an almost memory tugging at the back of Lucas's head.

Every time he walked past it. Lucas remembered the feel of the car, how the front seat, the leather itself had somehow adjusted to his body. How quiet it had been, how the leather had wrapped him in luxury, then called him down. Held him, in place, waiting for the first shovel full of dirt that would always come.

It didn't help that, once Pedro closed the big doors against the wind, what sun infiltrated the big open garage came in only from the high second story windows. The harsh interior lights when they came on helped the mechanics find the parts when they hit the floor. But they held precious little comfort.

After Gary and Pedro clocked out, Lucas found himself fighting the feeling that the car waited for him. All the way from the big panel where he threw the switches on the garage lights, while he closed the door between office and tool-pulling world. As he made ready to escape to the house.

Sunset had gone already, just before six and the light had found another part of the world to be in when Tara Washington made her appearance.

Lucas fought off an urge to get up and howl. And the grin, she'd have misread it, Lucas wanted to grin because he'd have had to scoop Gary off the floor. Even Pedro would have found reason to wander into the office.

Tara Washington brought that kind of feeling with her. She moved in a dancer's strut, the world tilted so that Lucas could do nothing but focus on the woman walking through the door.

"Miss Washington?"

She nodded. "I hope you can fix my baby, Mister?"

"Lucas, I mean Little. Hell," and he reached hands smelling of GoJo but with the grease remnants forever embedded in the lines of palm and knuckles, "I'm Lucas Little."

She shook his hand, and Lucas felt his stomach drop again. And not in the good way, not at all how a smiling hot lady holding his hand should have made Lucas Little feel.

More like the way he'd fuzzed out, when Gary had first handed him the keys to her car this afternoon. 'That's where that came from,' Lucas told himself.

And he had no question at all that Tara generated that feeling. Had passed it on, to car and key, and then to Lucas himself.

Lucas passed that thought from his mind. 'Focus, Dub,' he told himself.

"It's been giving me trouble for a few weeks now," Tara was saying.

'Weeks, months,' Lucas translated in his head, the mechanic's habit. "I had to work with it a bit to get it started and into the garage," Lucas answered. "How often has it stalled on you?"

"That's the first time it's completely failed, Mister Little."

Lucas had plenty of practice keeping his face straight. Older cars of the type Lucas specialized in, especially for the owners who'd found their way to him on three cylinders and a prayer, those folks knew what they'd got themselves into. They didn't often feel the need to lie about the expense and the trouble.

Owning an antique European car for any longer than a minute had, in Lucas's experience, a way of stripping away the illusions.

Folks with the newer cars, on the other hand, or those who'd only recently taken custody of their problem children... twenty years in business and Lucas had become just as well familiar with folks looking mostly for some kind of deal over their brand dealer's prices.

"Call me Lucas, please, Miss Washington." Give her a little comfort, Lucas told himself. Because it was all about to get very expensive.

****

"Why you want to do that to yourself, Dub?" Denetta had asked him once.

'Why you want to tie yourself to something out of your reach?' That's the way his sister's words had sounded to Lucas. Like she'd come down out of her clouds and her books, just to find her little brother covered in ink and self-inflicted injury.

To go along with the grease, and the way his palms had gone calloused and smooth from the work.

To himself, the tattoos connected to a piece, a part of himself that spent nights and weekends reaching for something Lucas could never quite explain, even to himself. To Denetta, well. "Maybe you just go on and worry about yourself, 'netta," he'd responded, to her question and his own.

Not that Denetta had ever really taken the hint. But she had at least stopped asking about the tattoos.

The rest of his life, on the other hand, Denetta kind of had to ask about. She did the books on Lucas's garage.

And carried around all the big sister stuff. The big sister who went to college, the big sister who went all the way and got her CPA.

Momma passed and big sister wanted to keep her promise to Momma that little knuckleheaded brother wouldn't bankrupt himself because he'd been using his tax account to pay for parts. Or vacations or a girl or...

Lucas let all that pass one ear and keep on running to wherever nonsense went. Lucas had made himself into probably the best Jaguar and BMW mechanic in the area, and certainly the only black garage owner that worked on the finicky beasts. That he knew of, but it's not like there was a directory or anything.

He had to fight every year to make Denetta teach him what she did, instead of just doing the work and handing him a paper to sign. So Lucas also had to put up with her questions, well meant yeah but just a little too close to prying at him.

The second day, the second morning Lucas woke up parched, drawn, and waiting for the monster that had found him to return, Lucas stumbled out of his little house, to the half truck, and then down the road to his big sister's place.

He never knew whether the old Volkswagen drove him, or whether it happened the other way around. Blood loss had caught up with him.

Lucas woke up again to find himself sitting in Denetta's driveway. No memory of how, or why he'd come. "She's not even home, fool. Tax season. 'netta's off at work, earning the big bucks."

A whisper came then, of energy and sounds, up from and through his tattoos and the brand and then to his mind. "You should be at home, Lucas." And so he should.

Lucas drove back home, fresher somehow but still drained. He climbed the stairs to his room, energy barely enough to ignore the uncased emergency kit, the one he'd brought home to dig through because that sales hotshot had had the balls to put a little sign that said "Advertise your garage here!" on the case.

Lucas sat on the bed, head in his hands. Waiting.

****

She'd come into the house, invited that first night, because... when he'd presented her with the keys that night, Friday just after the sun went to sleep. Just after Lucas had sent Gary and Pedro off for the long weekend, Miss Washington that's when she came through the door again.

"I got your message. She's back, you fixed her, right?"

Lucas held up the keys. "You're all set, Miss Washington."

The blue beast sat in the ready line, waiting for Lucas to raise the rolling metal and free the car to the road. Lucas walked his client down the big yellow line painted on the concrete, the only space in the garage proper the insurance company allowed for showing the paying customers the state of their babies.

Tara Washington walked around the big Jag, hand gliding just over the metal and the glass.

'Like she's communing with it,' Lucas told himself. And then he fought off a shudder coming with a static buzz on the back of his neck.

The car answered its owner's unspoken questions.

"Do me a favor?" Washington asked.

"What's that?"

"Ride with me, just for a while. I know you've done good work, but..."

"It is Friday night, and you don't want to call a tow truck if we missed something? I can do that." Lucas would have loved to have blown her off, told the lady that he'd driven the car, no way would she be spending her evening in the breakdown lane waiting and cursing his name.

Only, he'd had to work up his own courage just to fire the car up. And then drive it around the block. Under the hood, that much had been just right as rain. Chasing spark plug wires, throttle and injectors, the mechanicals of the beast whispered to Lucas in the song of gasoline and oil, spark and air.

Sitting in that seat, on the other hand...

Lucas waited for Miss Washington to pull the Jag out of the garage, then he closed the bay door and locked up the office. He knew he was playing for time, dragging out the moment.

Until he opened the passenger door and sank down, half into memory of a box on his and five other shoulders, half through a projection of a pine board over his face and the murmur and tears of his mourners echoing in the darkness.

"Do you ever get tired of that feeling?" Washington asked him, as she pulled away from the curb. "Doesn't it feel like you've come home at last?"

The question burned in Lucas's mind. Tugged the idea of death right up to the front where he didn't want it to be. "What do you mean?" Lucas managed to answer.

"You spend all day with these cars, don't you?" she continued, as if she'd of course never meant anything at all by the other question.

'But she really did mean that other feeling, didn't she?' Lucas thought. He rode in silence for a time, letting the lights roll across him as Miss Washington made her way to the freeway.

"We spend most of our time under the hood, Miss Washington," he finally answered. "We want you to be the one to enjoy the driving part. That's why we're here."

She laughed, a sound that thrilled him and scratched a burning needle across his eardrums at the same time. "Oh, come on now, like you don't jump in and take off down the highway once in a while?." But then Miss Washington buried the throttle pedal, drowning whatever thought and answer Lucas might have had in the roar of the Jag's engine.

Later, after, when his mind answered his own questions again, Lucas figured that that particular moment was, probably, the one.

Thrown back in the leather, back into the embrace of the car that his mind insisted felt like a hearse, his tattoos burned fierce and hot under the scrutiny of Tara Washington and the blue sedan that did her bidding.

In that endless moment, the one that extended miles down the interstate toward the coast, then back around through traffic lights and back road turns, to the garage where Lucas climbed back into his half truck and headed for the house, shaking his head at himself, and then all the way home... throughout that long instant, in that forever, Lucas figured he had it all under control.

Check in hand and just a memory of a blue XJ with bad plugs, some salesperson's free shit riding in his other arm and up to the house to get a pizza in the oven and the Rockets on the screen, yeah baby Mister Little is in a good way, man.

And it all went away when those round headlights burned their way into Lucas Little's driveway.

****

Sunday morning, the third day, Lucas rose from an empty bed with the first hint of daylight.

Unlike the day before, he didn't feel hungover. He felt light. Not rejuvenated. Just, weightless.

If he'd had more of his memory under his own access at that moment, he'd have put the feeling with what he'd learned of fasting. When he'd been the younger Lucas, and working on the part of himself that the tattoos and the brand connected to.

That Lucas slept; she'd taken him away. A fingernail had traced the hope on his arm.

A claw had replaced the nail. But that memory drifted away as lightly as a summer breeze.

Lucas stood up from the bed, put on jeans, a t-shirt. Work boots. Threw on a long-sleeved denim shirt.

He kept a coat in the Volkswagen, buried in with the rest of the tools and accumulation in the passenger seat. Lucas kept as well an open mind, free of thought, absent of intention, while he pulled keys and wallet and headed out for the jacket.

And then eased himself into the Jag's driver seat. He'd lied, just a little, to Miss Washington. About whether a mechanic ever took a client's car out on the road and opened it up.

The car didn't mind that at all. Sunday morning, early, when the only traffic came from grandpa's out to get donuts and a newspaper, Sundays made good driving weather.

Lucas tried to crack the window, to let just a little cold air onto his face, the back of his neck. But the arm wouldn't turn. The car didn't mind the drive, he told himself. 'Elsewise, keep your hands to yourself,' Lucas thought.

The miles drifted by in the soft rumble from the front end and daylight coming on from the back, the sun chased Lucas and the Jag all the way to the garage.

Lucas felt in the pocket of his jacket, pressed the button that told the garage door to open. Drove into the working space and thumbed the button again to send the door back down. 'Just a few errands, that's all. A little Sunday morning work so Monday can start off right.'

He held that thought, magic, talisman, strength. While he turned the Jag off. Pulled the keys. Climbed out of the leather and the grasp of death, never so very far away even while he strode over to the plasma cutter.

Daylight streamed in through the windows high, way up at the roof line. Late winter, this early, the light pooled just into a ribbon, down the back wall and out a little ways onto the concrete floor.

Where Lucas had pulled the Jag to. Next to the corner where he stored the cutter and the torches.

He made sure the cutter's box hummed, that the leads weren't tangled up, before he pulled himself to the back of the Jag.

And set the key in the trunk latch. 'Boot,' a part of himself translated.

The part of himself that smiled at the way things worked out.

She'd become... no. She'd dropped the illusion. In the gesture. There in his kitchen, standing in moon light, she'd traced the Sanskrit word on his arm with a fingernail.

His skin, that tattoo and the other ones, lit up the vaults of Lucas Little's mind in response to the nail. And when the nail became a claw, a horned and twisted talon burying itself in the flesh of his neck, Tara Washington disappeared.

Leaving a grey twisted ancient being where she had stood. "You prepared yourself," that being whispered to Lucas.

He had to listen to it. The talon held him. And so did the being, the vampire's mind. With its eyes, and with the burning light of its voice within Lucas's mind.

"But you prepared yourself for a day that will never come," it told him.

And then it dragged him, by no more effort than the tip of a nail and the whisper of a thought, into the teeth of its maw.

That night, and the night after, Lucas had fought. That's what he told himself.

Only, his own arms and legs had betrayed him. He tried to command them, but while the vampire held sway, when it set its double jointed knee on his chest and bore down to feed, Lucas's arms and legs ignored his shrieking panicked mind.

And only flared burning pain in the shape of words and images he'd put there.

Door closed, the car's influence couldn't reach him. Lucas remembered that, that he'd worked on the car, the mechanicals of it, without that death feeling coming into his mind.

So it was his own fear that weighed on each step as Lucas made his way to the Jag's trunk. Heavy gloves and dark goggles, key in one hand and the plasma cutter in the other. Three steps and a little work and he'd open the door to the only place she, it, the ancient thing that had held and fed on him, it had to be in the trunk.

And the only thing preventing Lucas from opening the trunk and doing what needed doing was his own fear.

'The car will come into it,' his mind whispered. 'That's really why she was worried. The car protects her during the day.'

Flashes of old memories, sitting with 'netta at two in the morning while Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing chased each other around whichever Hammer Films set had been tuned up for the creature feature that week.

'And she'll react to the light and the cutter,' his mind added in response to the memory.

Lucas had risen from his bed, and made the drive to the garage, absent of intention. So that the car wouldn't react.

And so his own fears wouldn't drown him. Lucas twisted the key and opened the trunk.

He had to fight the weight, almost forty years and the springs had just about given up whatever lifting help they'd started out with. There, across the black carpet and hiding in the deepest shadows, nestled a wooden box.

Not quite a true coffin, but close enough for Lucas's mind. The car seized on the intrusion, then, and forced that memory-projection, its only defense, into Lucas's head.

Death. The long walk from the hearse to the pit, surrounded by fresh-turned earth and astro-turf to hide it and a handful of mourners keening to the skies and Whoever would listen.

Lucas fell, half into the trunk. His belly caught before he collapsed to his knees. He gasped against the coffin lid closing in his face, yanked on the plasma cutter's lead, pulled for his life.

The rubber of the lead caught hard against the metal of the trunk deck, for an instant. Long enough for the thud of dirt against the pine box lid to echo in Lucas's ears.

And then the lead came free.

Lucas closed his eyes and twisted the cutter's grip until the crackle in his ears drowned out the car's intrusion into his mind. Then he clapped the goggles down over his eyes.

And turned the plasma on the box, and the terrible ancient being sleeping within.

****

Lucas Little knelt in front of the old grocery depot that he'd used twenty years of overtime, sweat, tears... and burns to turn into something. A piece of himself.

He knelt there on the sidewalk, in front of God and everybody, and then Lucas vomited up three days worth of bile and terror.

He emptied himself of that fear, and probably a little of the exhilaration that coursed in to replace it, until he heard the little kid ask his momma, "What's that man doing?"

Lucas smiled, wiping his face, as the lady sped up her Sunday walk home from church, kid's hand grasped just a little tighter in her protective grip.

He'd need to make up a lie about doing body work and getting caught by fumes from the filler. For sure, he wouldn't be telling the neighborhood church ladies how Lucas had really spent his Sunday morning.

The vampire had carried no illusion around itself, there in its box. When Lucas reached out with fire and anger, the wood had parted from the plasma as if grateful. As if ready at last to betray its dread master.

And behind it lay the true beast, gray, wrinkled, human only by suggestion. And yeah, just like those old Hammer films, the vampire twisted itself away from the light of sun and plasma.

But Lucas could, and did, chase it with the plasma. And it did not truly awake, even under this final threat.

He reached in, grasped the arms against this reflex action, and torched the vampire back to whatever hell had spawned it.

With every pass of the torch, the car's intrusion on Lucas's mind faded a little more. And the tattoos and brand ceased to burn, closed and became no more a path into Lucas's mind.

Lucas let the memory and the fear fade away. Then, he pressed himself to his feet and stumbled back into the garage, to turn the cutter on the car itself.

Though, he almost didn't have to bother. Like every old car owner's worst nightmare, the Jag rusted itself to decay faster than Lucas could chase it with the plasma. By the time dark found him, passed out on the old futon he kept in his tiny little office space, decay and his torch had rendered the Jag into a pile of unrecognizable parts.

With a black smear of oil and gasoline, and maybe something else, spreading out across the concrete floor. As though something in the old car had tried, with one last fruitless effort, to run away from the torch and the sunlight.