Bill The Vampire - 01 (15 page)

“I might refrain from partaking,” Ed murmured after a moment or two. Tom agreed.

“Well, that's how it was for me. No matter how good it tasted, I couldn't get it out of my head that I was giving some naked guy a mega-hickey.” At last, I could see the beginnings of understanding in their eyes.

“That which is seen...” Ed said.

“Cannot be unseen,” I finished.

“So, by that logic,” Tom cut in, “wouldn't chowing down on a hot swimsuit model be okay?”

I thought about it for a few seconds. “Yeah, I guess so. Hot chicks would definitely be on the menu.”

Ed shook his head. “No. I don’t think so. That would be a waste of some perfectly good ass. They're too rare (
at least in our apartment
) to kill. You don't hunt endangered species. Killing a hot chick would be like clubbing a baby seal. Not cool.” Damn, he had me there. Score one for logic.

“What if Bill was drunk and it was a fat chick?” Tom asked.

“Your wisdom is sound, my friend. Nobody loses points for an ugly girl if they're hammered at the time,” Ed agreed.

I concurred, “That's cool. A few shots of tequila and I could see myself getting all up in that shit.”

That
important
issue being settled, we bullshitted some more until Ed suggested (
considering that, so far, we had more questions than answers
), taking some time to chart my new powers would probably be a good idea. Damn, why didn't I think of that? Knowing what I was capable of could potentially help me down the line (
like, say, a little less than three months down the line
). At the very least, it might keep me from doing something stupid, like tossing myself out of another third story window.

Hence where we were now. Tuesday night was spent testing out some stuff we could do without actually leaving the apartment, including trying to figure out my sudden aversion to Optimus Prime. Unfortunately, despite several retries at grasping the toy (
much to my protests against doing so
), we were no closer to solving any mystery more complex than whether or not Febreze will cover up the scent of burning vampire (
pretty well actually
).

It was Tom who had suggested the gym. It would give us some hard numbers to gauge my strength against. Even if it didn’t work, it would be better than spending another evening charbroiling my hands.

Fortunately, the place was fairly empty. Aside from the counter girl (
who couldn't quite suppress a smirk when we came in and told her we were evaluating workout options
), there were only a few middle-aged types moving between the treadmills and stationary bikes. That was good. No use calling extra attention to ourselves.

We gravitated toward an old universal machine off in the corner. It'd be more discrete than loading plates much heavier than a person of my stature should be able to lift onto some weight bench. I wasn't too worried about being outed as a vampire, but, if we started doing weird ass shit that got noticed, we might find someone calling the cops, thinking we were on PCP. I was pretty sure meth-heads didn't use their manic drug-induced strength for the purposes of working out, but better safe than sorry.

The machine maxed out at three-hundred and fifty pounds, and that's what Tom set it to as I sat down at the bench press. “Shouldn't we start low and work our way up?” I protested.

“Warm-ups are for pussies,” was his reply.

Okay, I can do this... maybe, I thought, as I prepared to lift a
lot
more than I would have ever even considered trying.

“If something happens...” I started

“You'll heal fast. We already know that,” Ed finished. I was feeling the love, I tell you.

I needn't have worried. I started to push and, as I put on the pressure, I actually felt the bar start to rise with the effort. Holy crap! I mean, I knew I was stronger after the whole being turned into a vampire thing, but it was another thing entirely to know how much I was lifting.

“Goddamn, you're doing it!” Ed whispered.

“Yeah,” Tom said in awe. “How does it feel?”

“Badass!” I grunted

“No, stupid. How does the weight feel?”

“Heavy, but I could handle some more.”

Ed took a quick look around, saw that nobody was looking, and hopped up onto the weight stack. Ed wasn't a big guy, but he pushed the total easily past the five-hundred pound mark. I gave a loud grunt and almost lost it, but managed to keep it up... barely.

“Thanks!” I sarcastically wheezed once I had lowered the bar.

“Don't mention it,” Ed cheerfully replied.

We moved on to other exercises and spent about another hour obtaining similar results. I wasn't going to be casually throwing cars around anytime soon, but the results were definitely impressive. At last I’d had enough, and we found ourselves alone in the locker room, cleaning up and getting ready to head home.

“That was fucking wild,” said Tom excitedly. “You're like a freaking super soldier. We're talking
Captain America
here!”

“At the very least, Bruce Willis from
Unbreakable
,” countered Ed.

“I guess that's cool,” I sighed.

“What?” sniffed Tom. “You were hoping for the
Hulk
?”

“It's not that,” I said. “It's just that I can lift all that weight; I can take all sorts of physical abuse. Hell, I could probably kick ass in a dozen Olympic events.”

“Developing a high opinion of ourselves, are we?” Ed quipped.

“You know what I mean!” I said as I stood up and started flexing in front of a mirror. It didn’t look any more convincing than it had before I became the undead.

“I can do all this shit I couldn't do before, and I
still
look like
this
! I mean, when the hell is it going to happen?”

“When is
what
going to happen?”

“You know. When am I going to get all...
sexy
?” I said in a small voice.

Tom and Ed took a second to give each other a glance, and then Tom responded, “Bill, I ask this with all due sincerity... what the
fuck
are you talking about?”

“My entire coven!” I said, feeling a rant coming on. “They look like they stepped out of a fashion shoot, each and every one of them! So, I figured eventually it might happen to me. You know, like in
Interview with the Vampire.
Brad Pitt got bitten and suddenly his hair got all done up and he was a lot better looking.”

“Well, for starters,” Ed said calmly, “it was just a stupid fucking movie, idiot. Secondly, he looked like Brad Pitt to begin with. Being bitten didn't turn him into Brad Pitt.”

“Yeah, but he at least got Fabio hair,” I pointed out.

“You'd look stupid with Fabio hair.”

“Fine, no Brad Pitt,” I whined. “But what about Antonio Banderas?”

Fully engaged now, Ed took the bait, while Tom sat back to see how this would all play out. “Antonio Banderas? Why the hell would you want to look like him?”

“He was in that movie, too. Also had great hair and seemed to be doing pretty well for himself.”

“Pretty well? He's married to Melanie Griffith. She's definitely seen better days.”

“Well, yeah, now he is,” I agreed. “But back in the day he nailed Salma Hayak.”

“That was just in
Desperado
, dipshit!”

“Fuck that. I guarantee he banged her in real life. Even if he didn't, he had a long sex scene with her and was groping her tits throughout the entire thing.”

“I will concede you that point,” said Ed. “However, your logic has one major flaw. In
Interview with the Vampire,
he was busy lusting after Brad Pitt. Dude had gone totally homo for him. Shit, pretty much every vampire in that movie did. It was like a giant vampire man-ass festival. If that's what you're going for, you're going to need to rethink that whole sucking-on-naked-dudes-phobia you’ve got going on.”

“Stop right there, because I got you now, motherfucker.” I got all in his face. “Not every vampire lusting after Brad Pitt was a guy.”

“I'm pretty sure they were.”

“What about Kirsten 'I banged Spider-Man' Dunst?” I pointed out.

“Dude, she was like twelve.”

“Originally, yeah. But near the end she was more like sixty.”

“She still looked twelve.”

“Gotta agree with Ed on that one, bro,” Tom piped in.

“Shut up!” Ed and I simultaneously told him.

I wasn't about to lose this one. “It doesn't matter what she looked like. Before she got turned to dust, she was more than old enough for Brad Pitt to pork.”

“That's fucked up,” he said. “So you're saying his character was a pedophile?”

“Read my lips... SHE WAS SIXTY!”

“That vamp who bit you must have drained all the blood from your brain. She had the body of a kid.”

“And the emotional maturity of an adult,” I countered.

“Her body still looked like a kid.”

“So? Some midgets look like kids. Are you saying anyone who nails a midget is a pedo?”

“Not the same thing, asshole! They're physically mature adults.”

“Who just so happen to look like kids. According to your logic, that makes it the same thing!”

“You know,” said Ed, throwing up his hands in disgust, “sometimes I just can't talk to you. It's like trying to communicate with a retarded bonobo.”

“In other words,” I grinned, “that's point and match, bitch!”

“Fuck you. And you'd still look stupid with Fabio hair.”

Following work Thursday night, we took a field trip, as Tom called it, to a church. There, after seeing that I didn't burst aflame upon entering (
I was starting to tire of how most of these tests seemed to be against how flammable I might or might not be
), we pretended to pray until we were alone. Then Tom and Ed took turns either splashing me from the holy water basin, or touching me with the various altar relics. In all cases, nothing happened, except perhaps that I wound up both wet and annoyed.

“We probably shouldn't be surprised,” Tom said on the way home. “I think that was a Lutheran church. According my grandmother, they're already a den of Satanists.”