Death is Only a Theoretical Concept Read online

spend his twenty-first birthday. Home for the three-month summer with the promise of that awesome stereo installed in his car before the drive back to campus—and, hell, he’s even going to get laid for the privilege. Sobo sent enough money from Japan that he can keep a girl plied with the poison of her choice, should that be necessary. Why would it, though?

  “Did Mum tell you about the condoms?” Chichi sits on the old, fraying leather couch, his head fixed in the direction of yet another Iron Chef repeat. He sighs when he turns his head and looks at Steve: for all that Steve looks more Japanese than he does white, the two otherwise have only their lack of height in common. Chichi is a fussy, quiet man who likes dressing gowns when he’s not wearing dress shirts. How it is he manages to keep a classroom in line is beyond Steve’s understanding. How it is he managed to fall in love with Mum is beyond Steve’s understanding. “You won’t meet up with another topless circus performer, hai?”

  “I hear Jack honking,” Steve says as he picks up a jog and heads to the front door, not in any way needing to continue the conversation about Emma and her career pretensions. They broke up, so why keep talking about it? “Talk to you tomorrow. Mata ne!”

  “Steve—”

  He slams the front door behind him and cuts off anything else Chichi might have said. Jack, thank fuck, slams his hand against the wheel for another round of horn-blasting, but stops when he sees Steve head down the drive toward his rusting dual-cab. Even now, fishing rods rest in their slots against the back of the cab, the tray filled with rope, boxes, eskies and collapsible chairs; someone who doesn’t know Jack would have thought him about to go for a spot of fishing on the breakwater.

  Phil, sitting in the front seat amidst a sea of hamburger wrappers and chip papers, snickers as Steve slides into the back and pushes aside the folded red, yellow and black flag Jack knocked off—or borrowed, given his claims that theft is only theft at the hands of invaders—from the local Indigenous Collective. What Jack means to do with the flag he hasn’t said, although driving around for two months with it resting in plain sight of both coppers and elders seems to be part of the plan.

  “What’s that fucking crap on your hair, Steve?” Phil turns his head and grins. “I thought you said you didn’t need to try and impress the chicks? Happy birthday.”

  Steve just shoots him the finger and clips his seatbelt.

  “You’ll have to try hard where we’re going, Akira-san.” Jack pauses to chortle and pull out of the driveway. “There’s a new bar in town, not that you Sydney wankers would know. Apparently it’s the hottest vamp hang-out, so we’re taking you there.”

  Shit, this was going to be easy. True, Steve had always thought himself closer to Jack than everyone else after the year they spent helping each other out with Jack’s depression and Steve’s agoraphobia, but how had he lucked out to get such an easy dare? Johanna spent a night in the old cemetery listening to feral settler zombies from the 1820s wail and moan about their untimely deaths, asking questions for her history thesis, and shooting them every time they tried to gnaw on her limbs. Of course, she tricked them into offering her that dare in the first place, but that didn’t make it easy. This little dare is nothing at all.

  “No worries. Piece of fucking cake.”

  Phil and Jack exchange glances and break into broad grins—one tanned under blond hair, one dark brown under wiry curls.

  “Yep.” Jack turns into the main drag, the streets dotted with clusters of vampires, tourists, the odd green-glowing fae and a few locals headed towards the hunter pub Serif’s Shotgun. “We take you to a bar or club, you hook up with a vampire there, and you have twelve hours to get laid and back to us. Then the money, Akira-san, is yours.”

  Steve’s feeling too good to give Jack the shit he deserves for that horrific nickname—not that it makes any kind of difference. “Too fucking easy, man.”

  Jack pulls the ute over down the beach end of Bay Road. The club is new—before Steve left for university it was a sewing-goods emporium—with the walls and windows now painted black. Feeders is printed on the door in a plain san-serif type, the door itself flanked by two muscular breather bouncers and one suit-clad vampire checking ID. Steve slams the ute door shut, strolls over and flashes his licence; the greyskin bouncer nods at the three of them as Jack and Phil follow suit.

  “Are you sure you’ve got the right place?” He shakes his head and stares, not at Steve, to whom he pays no attention at all, but at Phil, clad in worn jeans and a plain T-shirt, and Jack, who forgot to detach several hooks from the bottom of his flanno shirt. Steve can’t blame him for asking, since while they’re not wearing thongs or singlets, they’re only about one tier up the rung of what constitutes an appropriate dress code. They’d have been laughed out of any club, and most bars, in Sydney.

  Then again, this is Port Carmila, a town that only has a club because of the tourists and the fae’s expectation of culture: should a town of fishermen, farmers and hunters not look like fishermen when they go out? Can he really expect Jack to give a fuck about how inner-Sydney white-bread invader journalism students dress up when they head off after class for vodka shots? Steve, dressed as he is, would be laughed straight out of the Shotgun.

  “We’re just here to support him.” Jack grins and gestures towards Steve. “Friends can’t let him go out on his own, can they? It wouldn’t be right.”

  “You’ve got good friends,” the vampire says as he pulls out his stamp; it blurs as it hits the back of Steve’s palm. He has the most magnificent fangs Steve has ever seen, almost large enough to make speaking, kissing and any other jaw-related movements awkward. His eyes—dead and glassy, somewhat reminiscent of fishes and the Mer—take in Steve for the first time. “Not everyone here would be so confident in themselves. Good luck.”

  Fuck, does he think Steve one of those desperate wanna-be-fae leeches? Like a fucking breather tourist, desperate for a taste of the dark side? He grimaces, nods, follows Jack through the doors and down a flight of narrow, black-painted stairs into the building’s basement level. On first glance it looks like any ordinary club, if small: dance floor, gyrating bodies, pounding and ethereal EBM beats, one guy splashing something over the bar as he downs his drink. The rainbow strobe lighting makes the packed-in mass of grey complexions seem, for a moment, almost alive. The air reeks of sweat and alcohol. Steve lets out a breath, relaxes: he knows this shit, and nobody ever accused him of being unable to talk the leg off complete strangers.

  “Well?” Phil grins and shouts to be heard above the music. “Go, mate! Find a girl!”

  A girl. Right. Steve glances across the crowd—and blinks. There are girls in the room, but they’re in pairs, grinding up against each other in a way that’d be so fucking hot if he weren’t otherwise distracted. He spots a single girl at the bar, but then a tall vampire in a miniskirt and a black faux-leather corset sways over and tugs her off the stool. They vanish among the dancers, and he scans them again, hoping against hope that he was somehow mistaken. Vampires form the majority, but there are a reasonable amount of humans—he hopes they’re mostly tourists—swaying and writhing amongst the undead, while two ghosts cause sudden screams as they float through a small cluster of head-bobbing zombies. An aloof faerie prince, glowing pale green, holds court by the bar, surrounded by a gaggle of adoring, desperate-looking, thoroughly-entranced men. Women and men for sure, and some people whose gender Steve can’t begin to guess, but most of them are paired off in combinations that defy current marriage laws. No matter how hard he looks, Steve can’t find a single woman that isn’t watching other women dance—not except for Sophie Williams, pouring something red and viscous into shot glasses behind the bar. Men and women of all shapes, ages, sizes and varying degrees of dead and alive ... but not a single, solitary, heterosexual-seeming female vampire.

  On the contrary, there are plenty of single, solitary, gay-seeming male vampires.

  A few of them are even looking Steve’s way.

  What the fuck is Port Carmi
la doing with a gay vampire club? He knows Johanna and Izzy aren’t the only queers in town, but surely there aren’t enough to merit even a small club?

  Fag queen, whispers the spectre of Adam Swanston and his fucking footy-team cronies, the memory loud even though the halls of Port Carmila High School are three years past. Steve swallows and wipes his now-sweating hands on his jeans, not sure what to say. He got away from all that shit! University, in Sydney, means he’s well cut of all the goons that, unlike zombies, can’t be silenced with a few well-placed bullets, an axe, kerosene and a lighter. He spends his holidays with his mates who know he can master hair product and take down the feral undead. He got away, but how can he do this and not have all that shit start up again? Who the fuck is everyone going to remember, the gay vampire he fucked here or the girls he dated back in Sydney? Does your girlfriend know you’re really a fucking fag?

  It’s one thing to have flashbacks of the feral zombie biting at his hip; it’s another to hear the words of a fucking bully in the same visceral way.

  Across the room, two girls—a butch short-haired white girl in jeans and a waistcoat, a black zombie with corkscrew curls in blue lawn hoopskirts and a denim jacket—dart