“Have you consumed anything today?”I asked.
“No,” Brother Al said.
“Then how can you possibly vom?—”
There was a retching and splattering noise from the backseat.He just opened his mouth and pitched forward.It was like watching a fire hydrant let off a gallon of rusty, high-velocity water.
Eddie and Nagi wiped their faces.
“That was a brand new handkerchief,” Nagi said.He sighed and blotted some dripping fluid from his nose.“At least it’s red.”
“Must be an ulcer,” Brother Al said.“My nerves are aflame!And why are we driving during the daytime?The sunlight’s not safe.This won’t be good for any of us, and you’re all insane if you think this is a good idea!”
“We’re just going for a drive,” Vic said, in a gentle voice, from the driver’s seat.
“You’re cooped up in the city too much,” Eddie said.“You’re overworking yourself.”
“It’ll be a good time to unwind,” Nagi said.
“You’re fools,” Brother Al said.“Fools, the lot of you.”
On and on we drove, over hill and dale, through green wooded groves of trees, on highway eternal.
“Getting kinda low on gas,”Vic said.
“I told you we should have stopped in the city before we left,” Eddie said, looking up from the game of cards he and Nagi had started.
“Too crowded,” Vic said.“And too bright right then for a fillup.I can take it direct to the face for about five minutes before I start to lose my cool.”
“I can’t take it at all,” Brother Al said.
“Mmmm,” Nagi said.“I believe you and I have similar bloodlines.I believe, were I to shift my genetic structure—alter my shape—I could survive so long as I did not revert to my previous form.You could perhaps do the same.”
“Ha,” Brother Al said, voice mirthless.
“So how does the sun thing work?”I asked.
“It’s a whole thing,” Vic said.“Nightwalking is kind of a cultural thing, so to speak.We start out doing it because everyone else does it.It’s just easier to take prey in the night.When they can’t see you coming.Or don’t notice so much difference.”
Again.An uncomfortable rock in the pit of my stomach at the blasé way one of my boyfriends refers to his meals.‘Prey.’Humans, he meant.
“I’m a daywalker and it doesn’t bother me,” Eddie said.
“The sun is the sign of the Divine piercing through the layers of the Tree of Existence,” Brother Al exhaled.“His light burns—soaked in his divine essence.As creatures of shadow, we can only face it for so long before our essence itself begins to unravel.So is our curse.I hope one day to meet the sun, in a full embrace.Perhaps my darkness will be dissolved before I face Topside itself, and His Divine Machines.”
“I could open the window,” Eddie said.
Brother Al stared through the tinted windows on the horizon.
“I am not yet ready to face the music.We take so much for granted in our new technological age,” he said.“Days were I could not stare upon the light’s majesty for fear of my life ending.And yet.How quickly things change.”
“It only took three centuries to get the technology down,” Vic snarked, from the front seat.
Brother Al’s face was wistful as he stared at the blue sky.
“Centuries of darkness,” he said.“With only the Moon as a comfort to watch over us all.And now I travel in a horseless carriage powered by continuous explosions, going faster, perhaps, than any of us could ever run.And our smog covers the Earth in our toxins…” He put his gnarled, veiny, hairy hand up to the window and placed his palm near the sun.Steam began to curl slightly from under his fingertips.“That humans could see such beauty and be content to destroy it.Perhaps it takes an eternity of darkness to appreciate the simple joy of a sunny day…”
Nagi leaned forward and pulled the red velvet curtains closed that Vic had requested.
