Snare: Novellas and Short Stories

Snare

Novellas and Short Stories

Erin McRae and Racheline Maltese

Published by Avian30, 2017.

This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

SNARE

First edition. November 11, 2017.

Copyright © 2017 Erin McRae and Racheline Maltese.

ISBN: 978-1537861548

Written by Erin McRae and Racheline Maltese.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Snare

Also By Erin McRae

Also By Racheline Maltese

Snare

When Elliot Iverson is in the third grade, he learns about life, death, and the various legal statuses in between. The information comes in civics class, sandwiched between the checks and balances inherent in the three main branches of the U.S. federal government and the history of the country’s citizenship laws.

He doesn’t pay as much attention as he should. After all, he lives in California, and all the vampires live in New York, ostensibly confined to Manhattan Island by the rivers that surround it. Mrs. Sanchez tells the class that vampires are very tricky and that’s why hundreds of years ago they gave the city their money to help fund the building of bridges and tunnels that would let them escape. The plan failed, however, because the city simply installed checkpoints and trained dogs to make sure only the living could come and go as they pleased. But the vampires’ failed plan has still made New York the greatest city in the world.

And in that great city there are even humans who, although alive, apply to be declared legally dead so they can live the way vampires do.

Why would anyone want to do that? a curious Elliot asks.

Mrs. Sanchez explains that although these people are limited in movement, and may have no legal identity or bank account, they are under absolutely no legal jurisdiction: federal, state, or otherwise.

It’s a type of freedom, she says. "The official term for those people is Dead, with a capital D — the little d is for the biologically deceased — but they’re also called rabbits. The communities in which they live alongside vampires are called warrens."

As Elliot listens rapt, his teacher notes that while some say this system fuels New York’s crime and lawlessness, it has also made the city a mecca for artists and nonconformists, the seeking and the strange. All of it has given New York a vibrant culture that most only experience on television or at the movies. Trapped in the vast and boring inland wastes between Los Angeles and San Francisco, Eli decides that one day he is absolutely, positively going to move to New York.

WHEN ELLIOT IS TWENTY-three, he does. As if foreshadowed by the civics class that set his heart on the city, Eli’s move comes with the world’s most boring job. He gets a position as a clerk in one of the City’s seemingly infinite offices of municipal record keeping. Most days he works deep underground, where the least useful paperwork imaginable — the records of the Dead — is kept. But it is the days he must rise to the surface he finds most annoying; it means someone has made an error he must track down and resolve in person. It’s not, after all, like the Dead have cell phones. Those require contracts, which require credit cards, and both of those things are at least difficult to obtain without being part of the breathing and banking world.

His colleagues tease him as he hustles out of the Greek revival building that’s so much prettier on the outside than the inside. They all claim they stopped caring about their jobs after the first week, but Eli is up to nearly four months and is still armed with an enthusiasm his peers don’t just deem absurd, but unnecessary. Eli flips them off as he goes.

It’s winter, and ’a storm is coming — the type that’s bad enough to make the city actually shut down the transit system. Eli’s been told that’s a three-day nightmare. It takes a day to turn it off, a day to weather the storm, and a day to get it back up and running. He’s more than happy at the prospect of getting some t’s crossed and i’s dotted before beating the rush to the grocery store and then hunkering down in his ratty studio to watch movies and listen to the wind for days.

Eli grabs the 6 at Canal and tries not to gag at the heavy scent of mildew and rot that comes from the tracks. It’s been a wet winter already, and many of the stations are filled not just with drips and leaks, but, down on the tracks, streams and creeks. To Eli, who continues to consider the possibility that he’s just a tad too sensitive for this city, it’s a cause for irritation, and in the newspapers it’s been a cause for at least minor controversy.

All the articles have been in that no-man’s-land part of the metro section between the classifieds and the sports news, but the question of what constitutes a natural body of running water is actually interesting when so much of the city has been built over land reclaimed from the Hudson, East, and Harlem rivers. The rot in the subways is, as far as Eli is concerned, perhaps New York’s greatest reminder that its wealth and power lies entirely in its infrastructure and its Dead. While Eli sometimes dreams of Europe, he is happy to take the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century nature of New York over the strangely colored cement ugliness of the mid-twentieth century California from which he’s come.

When he gets off the train at Union Square — because the MTA is dreadful and has declared that all 6 trains are now running express — he finds the snow has begun in earnest. The wind drives it into his face, and it has the dry, too-cold feel of the impending blizzard. The colder the temperatures, the more snow any given storm produces. It has something to do with the shape of the ice crystals in every flake, he’s read.

By the time Eli reaches 20th Street, his face stings from the snow. His glasses are covered with it, and the only reason he hasn’t turned around to go home is that the ten minutes it will take to resolve this will, at least, come with shelter from the wind if not actual warmth. Also, Gramercy Park is beautiful. He didn’t know but realizes he should have assumed. New York may be status obsessed, but the whole world wouldn’t want a key to the park if it weren’t stunning. He can’t help but feel that the universe has been just slightly kind to him, letting him see its wrought iron, old trees, and ivy in the snow this early in the season and so soon after he’s moved here.

The numbers on the square confuse him, and he walks the full perimeter until he finds the building he wants. Even from the outside it looks like a warren, between its dark red brick and black trim and its fantastical architecture — turrets and half-octagon bay windows seem to jut at random from nearly every floor. The front door is deeply recessed and up a flight of stairs, and Eli is happy to climb them to get some shelter from the storm.

He looks for a bell to ring as he stands in front of the shiny black door, a giant golden knob embedded right in its center like a plug in a wound. But there is no bell to ring. Eli runs his fingers through his hair, swipes at the moisture on his face from both the snow and the way the cold has made his eyes and nose run, and rubs the back of his hand over his glasses to clear off some of the melting snow before he grabs the knocker and drops it against the door a couple of times. It’s so cold, he’s half-surprised when his hand doesn’t freeze to it. He really should have worn gloves. He clutches his messenger bag tight in front of his chest as he waits for someone to answer.