Prologue
3:06 a.m., Tuesday, February 2, 1999, the rooftop, Jack London Square parking
garage, Oakland, CA
J-Dawg, Stanley and Puck waited impatiently behind the parking lot’s elevator port.
It was aching cold. The icy winds from the nearby bay penetrated the openings in
their clothes like heat-seeking leeches. The lights from the Jack London Theater’s
neon marquee, which was directly across the street from the parking lot, bathed their
shivering bodies. The heavy set threesome, smoking cigarettes and drinking a
shared bottle of gin were identically dressed in large, blue down filled puffy jackets
that swished noisily from their constant pacing.
J-Dawg, Stanley and Puck cursed at the chilly night air, as they waited for the
owner of the lone black, Rolls Royce Silver Shadow that
occupied the top floor of the garage. They first planned to just steal the car when
they noticed it entering into the garage as they were leaving the Jack London
Cinema. Stanley figured, “anybody driving some luxury shit like that, must be loaded
with dead Grants,” so, they agreed to rob the driver and then take the car.
Puck asked, “What sort of house would a person that drives some luxury shit like
that live in?” Stanley answered, “No doubt a phat one, a house stacked with wealth.”
The plan changed yet again, as they resolved to rob the driver, his home and his car,
then leave town for a while. See a fancy car, rob the driver; this is how the three had
operated after robbing liquor stores had gotten boring some four months ago.
Sticking up liquor stores and now carjacking was Stanley’s idea.
The large, menacing looking Stanley was the highest-ranking member of the East
Side Cobalts. He believed the only way they could stay hard was for them to be on
the streets, thinking like the fools who operated on the streets. J-Dawg disagreed.
He felt, as the leaders of the Cobalt’s gang, there was no reason for them to
jeopardize their freedom by pulling heists as dumb as these. But those were
Stanley's orders, and his second in command Puck agreed, which left
J-Dawg no say-so in the matter.
They heard the rattle and hum of automation as the elevator began its ascent to the
top floor. The trio’s eyes met and they quickly took their places behind the elevator’ s
hull, their puffy jackets swishing lightly.
The fog hid their details. They waited with their automatic weapons drawn. J-
Dawg lowered his cornrowed head into his jacket collar and sneezed. His eyes met
the others when he finished, and J-Dawg knew there’d better not be a second
sneeze. “Good thing we didn’t bring that echo, Gat with us,” Puck, the stocky,
pimply-faced Latino who was never seen without his navy blue beanie, whispered
with a sneer. “That fool would have had to sneeze, too,” Puck said, mocking J-Dawg’
s best friend.
“He could have brought… what’s that ho’s name?” Stanley asked, before
answering his own question. “Yeah, Jennifer. If she is a Cobalt, you need to be
bringing her around so a brother can get to know to her,” he resolutely whispered to
J-Dawg.
J-Dawg didn’t respond to Stanley’s comment nor did he show any emotion. He
knew that he and Stanley would come to blows regarding Jennifer. This did not
bother him because he knew that he was more than a match for both the muscular
Stanley and his partner Puck, whose body had gone to flab just two years out of
Juvie. Jennifer had come to J-Dawg for help one night when he was visiting his
mother. After they both heard her story, his mother made him promise that he would
let nothing happen to Jennifer. And, on his mother’s word, it wouldn’t.
The ring of a digitized bell announced the elevator’s arrival and snapped J-Dawg
back to the reality of what they were about to do. The three cautiously peeked
behind the port and observed two men exiting. They were both thin white males with
long hair and long black leather coats. The taller of the two was blonde, his hair
down, leaving it to swing from side to side like he was making a shampoo
commercial. The second man’s hair was a darker blonde and pulled back into a
ponytail. They both walked to the car entrenched in conversation. The sound of
diesel engine trucks could be heard stirring in the background three blocks away.
The trucks were delivering produce to one of the few warehouses that had
survived the district’s renovations.
Spruced up with restaurants, nightclubs, live and work studios, art galleries and
movie houses, Jack London Square, once an industrial area, was now a safe haven
for Oakland to showcase.
“ This will be a piece of cake,” Stanley whispered. He smiled with so much
confidence that his gold teeth glistened through the foggy light. From his expression
it was clear he, as usual, would lead and the others would provide back up.
Seconds later, Stanley, Puck and J-Dawg appeared from behind the elevator port,
zeroing in on their intended prey like Nighthawks. The sound of their fleeting
footsteps was hidden by the noise of the departing 3:10 Amtrak train to Bakersfield
as it left the nearby newly converted Amtrak Station. The two men were enmeshed in
conversation, oblivious to the encroaching gun-toting assailants, who managed to
close in on them before the pair was able to get into their now frost covered Rolls
Royce.
“Freeze! And you won’t get hurt!” Stanley shouted, his deep country voice was
authoritative and menacing. Both men turned to face their attackers. Their leather
coats flowed fashionably in the crisp breeze and their stance seemed to suggest
they were more concerned with their image than their safety.
The two men responded to Stanley’s warning with dry expressions. They were
unimpressed by the threatening gunmen. J-Dawg noticed that even through the fog,
both men were extremely pale, as if they had never been out in the sun. Their all
black attire contrasted their skin color even more.
“All right,” Stanley continued, “We’re going for a ride. Get in the back seat. Do as you
are told and you will be glad that you did!”
Stanley suddenly noticed that the ponytailed man that was standing on the
passenger side of the Rolls had disappeared. He turned to his associates who
mirrored his bewildered expression. The man had vanished. “Where could he have
gone in the blink of an eye?” As Stanley stood there bewildered, he felt something
crawling up his leg. He looked through the shrouded night; down at his Timberland
covered feet and to his astonishment thousands of large cockroaches were crawling
up his body with tremendous speed.
“Aieeee!” he screamed with a piercing cry that seemed inappropriate for a young
man of his size and hardcore upbringing.
Within seconds the nasty creatures had covered his midsection. Now they were on
his neck and had engulfed his head. In a blind panic, Stanley began to run trying to
shake the pests from his body.
J-Dawg and Puck watched in stunned terror as their partner in crime, frightened
and confused, darted toward the edge of the parking lot, tripped over the guardrail
and fell eight stories to an instant death. Forgetting about their intended victim, J-
Dawg and Puck ran to the guardrail and looked down to see their buddy lying
motionless on the pavement under a streetlight. A pool of blood was forming under
his broken body. J-Dawg watched as the roaches rushed to the blood, consuming it
as fast as it flowed. The roaches then gathered together and turned into a glittering
mist.
“Arrgggg!” J-Dawg recoiled away from the sight of his dead childhood friend in
disgust and disbelief. Then he remembered the other man they planned to rob and
scanned the parking lot for him. If he made it out of the garage and to the
authorities, in addition to losing a buddy, J-Dawg would be going to jail, and at
seventeen he wouldn’t be going back to Juvie.
“Man look!” Puck called, capturing J-Dawg’s attention. Puck could see a mist now
floating from Stanley’s bloodless body rapidly ascending to the top of the parking lot.
In the milliseconds it took J-Dawg to react to Puck’s call, the mist ascended to the
top floor and circled Pucks face like a swarm of gleaming wasps.
“Get away from me!” Puck screamed, moving backwards to avoid the mist. His
jacket swished loudly as he furiously swatted in vain at the rapid moving mist.
“Dawg help!” he pleaded. That was Puck’s last cry for help before the mist
entered into his mouth.
“No!” J-Dawg gasped. He jumped in fright at the frost that came from his own
mouth.
J-Dawg watched Puck drop to his knees. Puck grabbed his throat with both of his
hands. His face registered pure agony as he fought the horror inside of him. Then
Puck’s struggling ceased and he gazed into the terror filled eyes of J-Dawg with
blank resignation.
He opened his mouth and the same roaches that attacked his friend Stanley now
exited his body by the thousands. Puck fell over with a thud.
“Get out of here!” were the words that flashed through J-Dawg’s mind. He
zoomed for the fog-covered stairwell that was adjacent to the elevator port. It
would lead him to the ground floor and to safety. J-Dawg was a few feet from the
door when the tall blonde man with the flowing hair appeared from nowhere
blocking the entrance of the stairwell. Smiling, he began to rise in the air hovering
between J-Dawg and the doorway. J-Dawg spent a split-second observing this feat
of amazement before turning to run the other way only to then see the thousands of
roaches that had thrashed Stanley and Puck, morphing back into the body of their
attacker. J-Dawg turned back again to face the tall blonde man who by now had
levitated at least fifteen feet into the air.
“Niles,” the floating man spoke to his earth bound partner, as he stood elevated in
mid air. “Must you always be one for theatrics?”
“I’m sorry Fraizer,” Niles replied surveying the damage that he had wrought while in
form of a mass of cockroaches. “Next time I’ll just hover in the air like a low cost
balloon in a Macys Thanksgiving-day parade.”
Fraizer then looked down at J-Dawg with an expression of pure malevolence and
ordered, “Come here!” His voice was both assured and seductive.
J-Dawg felt his large body being hoisted into the air by an unseen force. His
muscular arms and legs floundered, but there was nothing for them to touch. J-
Dawg’s sagging Tommy Hillfiger jeans dropped beneath his knees and he grasped
to pull them up. His ashy legs immediately felt the cold night air. He continued
skyward until he was inches away from Niles face. Whose pupils that glowed
brightly like red embers, spellbound him.
“You prey on innocents like the vermin of the night,” Fraizer scolded. J-Dawg could
feel the extreme heat of Frazier’s breath scorching the flesh on his chin.
Frazier ripped opened J-Dawg's jacket to expose his neck to Frazier’s long
sharpened fangs. “It’s only fair that you should exist like vermin. Scurrying from the
light and hiding in the shadows.” As the vampire buried his fangs into his virgin
throat, J-Dawg tried to scream. Yet, like an antelope locked in the mighty jaws of a
lion, he could make no sound.
3:06 a.m., Tuesday, February 2, 1999, the rooftop, Jack London Square parking
garage, Oakland, CA
J-Dawg, Stanley and Puck waited impatiently behind the parking lot’s elevator port.
It was aching cold. The icy winds from the nearby bay penetrated the openings in
their clothes like heat-seeking leeches. The lights from the Jack London Theater’s
neon marquee, which was directly across the street from the parking lot, bathed their
shivering bodies. The heavy set threesome, smoking cigarettes and drinking a
shared bottle of gin were identically dressed in large, blue down filled puffy jackets
that swished noisily from their constant pacing.
J-Dawg, Stanley and Puck cursed at the chilly night air, as they waited for the
owner of the lone black, Rolls Royce Silver Shadow that
occupied the top floor of the garage. They first planned to just steal the car when
they noticed it entering into the garage as they were leaving the Jack London
Cinema. Stanley figured, “anybody driving some luxury shit like that, must be loaded
with dead Grants,” so, they agreed to rob the driver and then take the car.
Puck asked, “What sort of house would a person that drives some luxury shit like
that live in?” Stanley answered, “No doubt a phat one, a house stacked with wealth.”
The plan changed yet again, as they resolved to rob the driver, his home and his car,
then leave town for a while. See a fancy car, rob the driver; this is how the three had
operated after robbing liquor stores had gotten boring some four months ago.
Sticking up liquor stores and now carjacking was Stanley’s idea.
The large, menacing looking Stanley was the highest-ranking member of the East
Side Cobalts. He believed the only way they could stay hard was for them to be on
the streets, thinking like the fools who operated on the streets. J-Dawg disagreed.
He felt, as the leaders of the Cobalt’s gang, there was no reason for them to
jeopardize their freedom by pulling heists as dumb as these. But those were
Stanley's orders, and his second in command Puck agreed, which left
J-Dawg no say-so in the matter.
They heard the rattle and hum of automation as the elevator began its ascent to the
top floor. The trio’s eyes met and they quickly took their places behind the elevator’ s
hull, their puffy jackets swishing lightly.
The fog hid their details. They waited with their automatic weapons drawn. J-
Dawg lowered his cornrowed head into his jacket collar and sneezed. His eyes met
the others when he finished, and J-Dawg knew there’d better not be a second
sneeze. “Good thing we didn’t bring that echo, Gat with us,” Puck, the stocky,
pimply-faced Latino who was never seen without his navy blue beanie, whispered
with a sneer. “That fool would have had to sneeze, too,” Puck said, mocking J-Dawg’
s best friend.
“He could have brought… what’s that ho’s name?” Stanley asked, before
answering his own question. “Yeah, Jennifer. If she is a Cobalt, you need to be
bringing her around so a brother can get to know to her,” he resolutely whispered to
J-Dawg.
J-Dawg didn’t respond to Stanley’s comment nor did he show any emotion. He
knew that he and Stanley would come to blows regarding Jennifer. This did not
bother him because he knew that he was more than a match for both the muscular
Stanley and his partner Puck, whose body had gone to flab just two years out of
Juvie. Jennifer had come to J-Dawg for help one night when he was visiting his
mother. After they both heard her story, his mother made him promise that he would
let nothing happen to Jennifer. And, on his mother’s word, it wouldn’t.
The ring of a digitized bell announced the elevator’s arrival and snapped J-Dawg
back to the reality of what they were about to do. The three cautiously peeked
behind the port and observed two men exiting. They were both thin white males with
long hair and long black leather coats. The taller of the two was blonde, his hair
down, leaving it to swing from side to side like he was making a shampoo
commercial. The second man’s hair was a darker blonde and pulled back into a
ponytail. They both walked to the car entrenched in conversation. The sound of
diesel engine trucks could be heard stirring in the background three blocks away.
The trucks were delivering produce to one of the few warehouses that had
survived the district’s renovations.
Spruced up with restaurants, nightclubs, live and work studios, art galleries and
movie houses, Jack London Square, once an industrial area, was now a safe haven
for Oakland to showcase.
“ This will be a piece of cake,” Stanley whispered. He smiled with so much
confidence that his gold teeth glistened through the foggy light. From his expression
it was clear he, as usual, would lead and the others would provide back up.
Seconds later, Stanley, Puck and J-Dawg appeared from behind the elevator port,
zeroing in on their intended prey like Nighthawks. The sound of their fleeting
footsteps was hidden by the noise of the departing 3:10 Amtrak train to Bakersfield
as it left the nearby newly converted Amtrak Station. The two men were enmeshed in
conversation, oblivious to the encroaching gun-toting assailants, who managed to
close in on them before the pair was able to get into their now frost covered Rolls
Royce.
“Freeze! And you won’t get hurt!” Stanley shouted, his deep country voice was
authoritative and menacing. Both men turned to face their attackers. Their leather
coats flowed fashionably in the crisp breeze and their stance seemed to suggest
they were more concerned with their image than their safety.
The two men responded to Stanley’s warning with dry expressions. They were
unimpressed by the threatening gunmen. J-Dawg noticed that even through the fog,
both men were extremely pale, as if they had never been out in the sun. Their all
black attire contrasted their skin color even more.
“All right,” Stanley continued, “We’re going for a ride. Get in the back seat. Do as you
are told and you will be glad that you did!”
Stanley suddenly noticed that the ponytailed man that was standing on the
passenger side of the Rolls had disappeared. He turned to his associates who
mirrored his bewildered expression. The man had vanished. “Where could he have
gone in the blink of an eye?” As Stanley stood there bewildered, he felt something
crawling up his leg. He looked through the shrouded night; down at his Timberland
covered feet and to his astonishment thousands of large cockroaches were crawling
up his body with tremendous speed.
“Aieeee!” he screamed with a piercing cry that seemed inappropriate for a young
man of his size and hardcore upbringing.
Within seconds the nasty creatures had covered his midsection. Now they were on
his neck and had engulfed his head. In a blind panic, Stanley began to run trying to
shake the pests from his body.
J-Dawg and Puck watched in stunned terror as their partner in crime, frightened
and confused, darted toward the edge of the parking lot, tripped over the guardrail
and fell eight stories to an instant death. Forgetting about their intended victim, J-
Dawg and Puck ran to the guardrail and looked down to see their buddy lying
motionless on the pavement under a streetlight. A pool of blood was forming under
his broken body. J-Dawg watched as the roaches rushed to the blood, consuming it
as fast as it flowed. The roaches then gathered together and turned into a glittering
mist.
“Arrgggg!” J-Dawg recoiled away from the sight of his dead childhood friend in
disgust and disbelief. Then he remembered the other man they planned to rob and
scanned the parking lot for him. If he made it out of the garage and to the
authorities, in addition to losing a buddy, J-Dawg would be going to jail, and at
seventeen he wouldn’t be going back to Juvie.
“Man look!” Puck called, capturing J-Dawg’s attention. Puck could see a mist now
floating from Stanley’s bloodless body rapidly ascending to the top of the parking lot.
In the milliseconds it took J-Dawg to react to Puck’s call, the mist ascended to the
top floor and circled Pucks face like a swarm of gleaming wasps.
“Get away from me!” Puck screamed, moving backwards to avoid the mist. His
jacket swished loudly as he furiously swatted in vain at the rapid moving mist.
“Dawg help!” he pleaded. That was Puck’s last cry for help before the mist
entered into his mouth.
“No!” J-Dawg gasped. He jumped in fright at the frost that came from his own
mouth.
J-Dawg watched Puck drop to his knees. Puck grabbed his throat with both of his
hands. His face registered pure agony as he fought the horror inside of him. Then
Puck’s struggling ceased and he gazed into the terror filled eyes of J-Dawg with
blank resignation.
He opened his mouth and the same roaches that attacked his friend Stanley now
exited his body by the thousands. Puck fell over with a thud.
“Get out of here!” were the words that flashed through J-Dawg’s mind. He
zoomed for the fog-covered stairwell that was adjacent to the elevator port. It
would lead him to the ground floor and to safety. J-Dawg was a few feet from the
door when the tall blonde man with the flowing hair appeared from nowhere
blocking the entrance of the stairwell. Smiling, he began to rise in the air hovering
between J-Dawg and the doorway. J-Dawg spent a split-second observing this feat
of amazement before turning to run the other way only to then see the thousands of
roaches that had thrashed Stanley and Puck, morphing back into the body of their
attacker. J-Dawg turned back again to face the tall blonde man who by now had
levitated at least fifteen feet into the air.
“Niles,” the floating man spoke to his earth bound partner, as he stood elevated in
mid air. “Must you always be one for theatrics?”
“I’m sorry Fraizer,” Niles replied surveying the damage that he had wrought while in
form of a mass of cockroaches. “Next time I’ll just hover in the air like a low cost
balloon in a Macys Thanksgiving-day parade.”
Fraizer then looked down at J-Dawg with an expression of pure malevolence and
ordered, “Come here!” His voice was both assured and seductive.
J-Dawg felt his large body being hoisted into the air by an unseen force. His
muscular arms and legs floundered, but there was nothing for them to touch. J-
Dawg’s sagging Tommy Hillfiger jeans dropped beneath his knees and he grasped
to pull them up. His ashy legs immediately felt the cold night air. He continued
skyward until he was inches away from Niles face. Whose pupils that glowed
brightly like red embers, spellbound him.
“You prey on innocents like the vermin of the night,” Fraizer scolded. J-Dawg could
feel the extreme heat of Frazier’s breath scorching the flesh on his chin.
Frazier ripped opened J-Dawg's jacket to expose his neck to Frazier’s long
sharpened fangs. “It’s only fair that you should exist like vermin. Scurrying from the
light and hiding in the shadows.” As the vampire buried his fangs into his virgin
throat, J-Dawg tried to scream. Yet, like an antelope locked in the mighty jaws of a
lion, he could make no sound.
Excerpt |
