“I didn’t want to drop the camera,” Ed wheezes from sheer terror, and he hates the way his voice sounds even as the blood wells up where skin met surface on the way down and his elbow’s a single solid welt of pain – he’d hit the ground hard, taking the fall like a putz and not like they’d practiced in the backyard. It’s worse without elbow pads. His shirt’s hiked up and his pudgy lower back is pressing into the asphalt. But he’s all right. He’s landed now, he’s on the ground and not skidding through the air en route to wiping out, and if he’s lucky it looked pretty fucking sweet before the impact hit.

Charley is unstrapping the camcorder from Ed’s hand before trying to address the bleeding or anything else – and Ed can’t even be offended because that thing cost pretty much all the wages from a shitty summer job and it’s as precious to Charley as it is to him.

“Maybe there’s still usable footage,” Ed wheezes for real, the breath seeping back into his lungs only by degrees. One stunt, one take. “I think the light was on. I think–”

“No way, fat chance. Did you hit your head?” Still laughing, but not at him, really. Charley pulls down Ed’s eyelid with a thumb and Ed grimaces, sitting up with his busted elbow hugged tight to his side. Kneeling down on summer asphalt, Charley yanks out some slack in the hem of his tee shirt and blots at the wound. He didn’t even see him do the flip, if he had to ask. Really, it should have been him holding the camera. Really–

It’s hard to be embarrassed in front of his best friend, even flat on his ass and bleeding; Charley does this stuff all the time, Ed thinks, trying to help. Torn-up knees, scorching wedgies, bloody noses – usually he deals with bloody noses by lashing out with poorly coordinated fists and getting his own nose busted to match. It’s good to have somebody who helps with this stuff. Like a spotter for all his best stunts. It’s good to have Charley there. He wants Charley to be there forever, partners in crime. He wants –

“No,” Ed says, and tilts his head back. “No, I think I’m fine. It’s just my arm. Did it look cool?”

“Yeah, it looked cool.”

The heel of Charley’s hand is on his forehead now, smudging back his sweat-soaked hair, and Ed giggles convulsively. Ed’s glasses are several yards away in at least two pieces, so the attendant figure of his best friend is nothing but a solicitous blur with a few finely detailed points – his shirt, his shoulder, his raggedly stitched cape. Leaning in – shiny chin, popsicle-stained mouth, braces, teeth.

He wants somebody who cares what happens to him, somebody who likes him. What if this is the only chance he gets? He wants Charley there, now and forever – Charley cares what happens to him, or he’d have split the moment he heard him wipe out on concrete, or he’d have laughed. Ed wants Charley, forever. In the noonday sun, with his back up against the concrete curb, Ed Thompson feels his best friend’s touch against his face, and thinks, oh no, oh no. Oh shit.

*

What if this is the last chance he gets? 

He’s organized plenty of tabletop game campaigns in his life – campaigns nobody ever played, hand-drawn maps and graphs nobody ever looked at, final bosses nobody ever threw down with. The most fun part is making the bad guys.

Make like a monster – burrow, like Tom Hanks in Mazes & Monsters. Hide out underground, in the dark, hoarding power like a juiced-up C.H.U.D. Every good monster has a lair. Jerry guides him down, down, down, and shows him what there is to see.

Ed can’t breathe at first when he comes back, he can’t move his legs; there’s chlorine in his eyes and in his throat and stiffening his hair. There’s a dead leaf adhering to the surface of his eye until enough moisture wells up to blink it away. Even in the dark, his vision crazes red. He’s down pretty deep. Down beneath the surface, the desert gets cold.

He’s in a hole – so that part is pretty clear. He’s not in a grave, he’s in a hole. Too stiff with cold to move his joints, too narrowly fit to spread his arms, half-sunk in dirt and stones and rubble. It figures; this place was going to be a construction site before long if nobody bought it. It is a construction site. He’s going to get buried here. He’s already halfway there.

“It rubs the lotion on its skin,” Ed says, after rolling his tongue around in his mouth for any last taste of blood – Jerry’s blood.

From high above Jerry says, “Ha,” and throws another shovelful of dirt down. It scatters over Ed’s face, settles into his scalp like lice, sticks to his wet clothes. The ground here must be sandy. It settles in the corners of Ed’s eyes.

*

If Jerry really wanted to entomb him for life, he’d have poured a layer of concrete over top and moved out. “Looks like you made it,” he says instead when Ed makes it back to the surface, and he’s audibly pleased. “I knew you would. We always do.”

Ed is all torn claws and lamprey-teeth at this point, honestly a mess, a pretty big disaster. The soil is sandy there. It wasn’t hard, clawing free, just – long. Ed’s had a lot of time to think. Maybe it’s been a couple days, or a couple nights, or a week. Maybe it’s been less than that. Strictly speaking, all signs point to Ed no longer needing to breathe, but the lack of constriction on all sides is incredibly freeing and every pull of breath just reminds him that his stomach is empty, his throat is dry. He’s hungry. He’s going to need to make some changes.

And Jerry is here, cool as a cucumber, with a folding chair and a paperback of ‘Salem’s Lot (vampire humor) and a half-eaten apple. He wasn’t expecting Ed so soon.

Around a mouthful of raw-sharp wolverine teeth, Ed grunts: “Uh-huh.” His new bones want to brace themselves, want to attack. One of his wrists is broken, a spar of bone shining clear in the light of the single caged lightbulb that swings from the scraped-out cathedral ceiling. This room is a cathedral and the hole Ed left behind him is a grave. Jerry comes toward with the cagey big-cat deliberation that’s now familiar to him, and Ed no longer feels the same visceral flinch at the sight of him in motion. Maybe his spine’s busted; he can’t even stand up straight. This must be how Gollum feels all the time.

There’s nothing on Jerry’s face that Ed can read. Hard white features, scary eyes, faint smile, teeth. He takes Ed’s wrist in a grip that could just as easily crunch his skeleton to powder, and with strange tenderness thumbs back the swollen cuff of skin struggling to mend over splintered bone. (Healing factor – cool.) 

Jerry presses down. Ed whimpers.

“I told you, you’re special. You were already different when I found you.” His palms bracketing the sprained-apart bones of Ed’s forearm, and you can hear the cartilage shifting – his thumbs rolling tendon back into place so that broken parts can slot back together again without impediment. Maybe not quite yet. He’ll need a boost, and maybe Jerry will give it to him. Ed’s itching in the underground light, all teeth, all hunger.

Jerry moves on to his dislocated shoulder next; it goes ‘pop’, and suddenly Ed can stand up straight again. 

So that’s the vampire theory confirmed. He must be fixing him for something, or he wouldn’t have kept him here – he’d have chopped off his head and ditched him in the desert, or boiled him down into high school boy purée. He must need him for something. It’s not the same as being liked, but it’s the next best thing.