Joe Vampire (24 page)

And vampires.

Sparkly, pretty, and nicely dressed. 

I flipped on the living room lights and slinked to the hallway, trying to watch my back and my front at the same time. All was clear ahead and behind, but someone else’s thoughts were still stuck in my brain. I swung open the doors to the bedroom and bathroom, but those were empty, too. There weren’t many other places for someone to be. So when he came dropping out from his hiding spot between the two walls above my hall closet, it sort of took me by surprise. He must have wedged himself up there like a fat Spiderman. His bulk knocked me backward into the living room, where we both crashed into the coffee table and smashed it flat. 

Guess I won’t be crawling back under there anytime soon.

He made a quick spin for being such a chubby guy, like he’d been practicing wrestling maneuvers for quite some time, and ended up straddling my waist and pinning me on the pile of table scraps. I could hardly breathe with his mass crushing my stomach. Then he raised his arm above his John Deere-capped head, and I saw the spike gleaming in the light as he swung it downward. I was able to catch his wrist before it made contact. But this guy had some mad power in his arms, and he shoved the metal point toward my face, aiming pretty directly for my throat and inching toward my ribcage. It took a second before I remembered what had happened in the gym with the weight machines.
I have a superpower I can use here…
So I clutched his wrist firmly and pushed, feeling the bones crackle slightly. I think he cried out “Holy Momma!” as he struggled, but it felt like there was no resistance from him whatsoever. I just held his arm back against his shoulder, pressing my thumb into the soft spot below his palm until he dropped the spike. “Goddamn, that hurts!” he hollered. Then I clutched his waistband and sort of hoisted him off of me as I stood up. I had him pushed up against the wall, maybe even coming off of the ground and kicking his feet in mid-air a little. He was a not-so-solid two hundred eighty pounds at least, and I had the better of him at a buck seventy. 

Vampire strength.

Fuck yeah! 

He was wearing a ten dollar workman’s tool belt like you get at Home Depot, with all kinds of odd stuff hanging off of it – garlic bulbs, a flask with a piece of masking tape with the words “holy water” written across it, a hand mirror, a pocket tool for fixing small appliances and cutting your way out of a seat belt… and opening beer bottles. “Is this some sort of vampire protection kit?” I asked him. His other hand was reaching into his pocket for what I imagined would be another spike. But when I caught that wrist in my grasp, all he was holding was a cross. “That doesn’t work on the Jews.” I twisted his arm behind him and shoved his face against the wall pretty hard, but keeping careful not to hurt the guy. He may have pulled a major sneak attack on me, and he looked armed for some fierce ghoul battle, but I had it all taken care of now. No need for bloodshed or bone breakage. And with this muscle-less strength at my disposal, it seemed all too easy to cause him real damage. No matter what he was trying to do to me, that wasn’t the direction I wanted to go with this. “What other fun surprises do you have stuck in your tool belt, huh, John Deere? Is there a gun in there, or a knife?” I ripped off the belt and threw it across the room.

“Don’t suck out all my blood, please, mister,” he begged me. “I got an old lady and a baby at home!” 

He had a deep,
deep
southern accent, like he might have been from a row of states between Texas and Mexico that haven’t been added to the map yet. For the sake of clear communication, I won’t try to reproduce it phonetically here. 

You’ll just have to imagine how it sounds as you read. 

He wasn’t putting up much of a fight, so I let him go, keeping cautious the whole time of where his hands were as he turned around.  They were mostly rubbing the pain out of his wrists. “What the fuck are you doing in my house?” I blasted. 

“It ain’t obvious?” He held his arms out so I could read his shirt: 

The Pire Hunter

Kickin Tires ‘N Killin Pires

Catchy. “So you’re a vampire hunter – is that it?”

“Yessir. I’m on Twitter and Linked In, and I’ve got a Facebook page. Bumper stickers and magnets are on order.” An overweight, socially-networked, media-marketed vampire hunter from the south, who likes mud bogs and domestic beer? 

There’s not enough mind reading vampiricity in the world to have picked up on something like that.

POST 34

Bo: Hunter

Vampire hunters are another element of the whole deal that I thought were only the “myth” part of the mythology – fantastic devices for storytelling as a counterpoint to the evil antics those literary Suckers of Blood were up to, but not an actual contingent prowling the night armed with stakes and crosses. By now, there aren’t many aspects of being a vampire that I haven’t considered from a real-world perspective. But the idea of people devoted to hunting them is just something that had never occurred to me.   

Now I know better.

“So there’s a huge call in this area for vampire hunters? Are there vampires just running around all over the place, like sewer rats?” I know they abound, especially down by Pomme, but it hardly seemed like common knowledge. So I tried to play it cool and condescending, hoping it would throw a smoke screen over the truth. I really didn’t think it would be too hard to do with the anti-genius standing before me in my living room.

I was right. It wasn’t hard.  

“I don’t know about that. I drove across town to get here. I’m mobile.” He turned so I could see that the map on the back of his shirt.
Serving the greater metropolitan area.
Like pizza delivery, or plumbing repair. “You’re my first kill… or you would’ve been if you hadn’t been so dang smart.”  

Don’s first change, this bozo’s first kill. I’m everybody’s first. “Well, sorry you wasted your gas. No vampires here.”

Once I denied it, he became a little more attentive, like suddenly he had to prove himself right to justify having the t-shirt printed. “Really? ‘Cause I could’ve sworn vampires had fangy teeth, like yours there.” 

“These? Genetic defect.” 

“And your pointy ears? Are those generic too?”

“It’s genetic, not generic and… and… ” I stopped mid-lie. “You know what? Screw this.” Suddenly I didn’t feel like playing my own game anymore; it was too hard to keep the list of lies straight, even in my own head. Whether or not he would have bought the excuses, it was time for me to try a different tack. This take-down I’d gotten over on the chubby hunter told me I could pull myself out of trouble if something here went sour. I didn’t want to cause any real mayhem, but I would go totally Tasmanian Vampire on his ass if it came to that. So I told him the truth. “You’re right, dude; you caught me. I’m a vampire.” 

He eyed me sideways. “Now you’re just shitting me, aren’t you? Messing with the dumb guy’s head?”  

Oh my God. This was rough.

“Nope – not shitting you, not messing with your head. I am a vampire.” I hardly ever say it out loud to myself, let alone to anyone within earshot. It felt kind of liberating. “That’s why you came here, isn’t it? Hunting vampires?”

That made him even more suspicious. “Yeah, but a ‘pire’d have to be real stupid to admit it to a hunter. You don’t seem stupid.” 

“Stupid or not, it’s totally true. No use denying it anymore – you found me. I am absolutely, without question, a vampire. See? Here are the teeth,” and I bared them, “and the ears,” and I showed them, “and this is where I was bitten.” I pulled down the collar of my hoodie and showed him the bite marks. “And my skin – see? It’s pale, kind of.” I almost wished I hadn’t kept up with the carrot juice. “And you can feel how cold it is. That’s how you can tell; all of those are signs that I am one of the undead. A vampire.” He just stood there, with a stunned redneck-in-the-headlights look on his face. 

I think my about-face totally threw him.   

He whipped a flashlight out of his pocket and shined it right on me. I hadn’t even thought about it, but my Ray Bans had come off in the tussle, and my all-black eyes were gazing right at him. The light dazzled the crap out of them. “But you don’t even sparkle. Maybe your hair, a little… not your skin, though. Nothing glittery about you at all.” 

I grabbed the flashlight and threw it on the floor, hoping it had broken. “I’m a vampire, not a pole dancer.”

He stepped forward to look closer, and I threw up Judo hands to warn him off. For the record: I don’t know Judo, but if he came any closer I had no qualms about figuring it out on the fly. “And why are your eyes all black like that? Where’s the gold parts?” 

“There aren’t any gold parts. This is what a vampire really looks like.” 

“My old lady read the Nightfall books about a thousand times. We got the movies on DVD, too. She knows everything there is to know about ‘pires.” I don’t know why he kept calling them ‘pires. Was it really so hard to say the whole thing? “You don’t look like you’re supposed to, the way those kids do.” 

“That’s a buttload of fiction.” 

He looked puzzled. “I got everything but that last word.” 

Really? I only said five. “It’s bullshit; make-believe. A fairy tale.”

“Fairy tale? Those movies don’t have a single fairy in them.” 

Wow. “Good point. Not a fairy tale in that way; it’s just a made-up story about vampires. It’s not based on real life.” 

“Sure sounds like real life to me.” This right here? This is the problem! 

This, as much as
This
. 

“What’s your name, Pire Hunter?” 

“Bo.” He kicked the carpet. “Ah, dogcrap. I’m not supposed to tell you that.” 

A hunter named Bo? Radical. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll probably forget it in a minute.” 

“Oh. Good.” 

“So Bo, you’re looking at a vampire – me; I’m a vampire. God’s honest truth.” I smiled a bit, putting on a friendly face despite my undeniably feral mouth. “Do I look like what they talk about in those books or show in the movies, aside from the fangs and sloppy hair?” 

It took a little doing, but I was finally able to convince him. “No… you don’t look like those people.” 

“Thank you for seeing that.” Something beyond the attack was bothering me, too. “Now… how the hell did you find out who I was and where I lived?”

I think I expected some sort of strange hillbilly answer, a backwoods yarn about the voodoo woman in the bayou sussing me out by reading chicken guts and tea leaves, or gazing half-drunk on moonshine into her crystal ball to find the numbers on my mailbox. I wasn’t even close. “Hell, I was just searching
vampires
on Bing for my old lady, and I found your blog. So I hacked it and traced it back to your G-mail address. Linked that to your PayPal profile and hopped to the address information from your credit card number.” 

Oh. Well, then.  

His Bing mojo put my Googling abilities to shame. “That’s impressive searching there, Bo. Sounds like you’ve got some mad tech skills up your sleeve.”

He blushed. “It was real easy… you got no security on your site at all. You should fix that. I can hook you up with a firewall and stuff, if you want.” Five minutes earlier he was trying to run me through with an iron stake, and now he was offering to help secure my blog devoted to Vampire Truth.

Quite a turn of events.

“I might just take you up on that. Thank you.” That felt strange. “So do I seem dangerous to you? Like I need to have my heart staked?” I hoped the answer would be self-evident.

“No… but neither do some of those Nightfall kids.” He paused a beat. “Oh, right. That’s all bullshit.”

“Right. All bullshit.”

Then it got quiet and uncomfortable. I was waiting for him to leave, sort of scoot off through my broken door and take his crowbar and his vampire killing paraphernalia with him. But he just stood there, staring at me like we were supposed to have something more to say to each other. So to signify that our exchange was unmistakably finished, I started cleaning up the living room, hoping it would prompt him to leave. Damned if Bo didn’t start cleaning up right next to me, gathering the scraps of my coffee table under his arm and putting things back together. I passed him back his belt. “Here’s your… kit.” 

He took it reluctantly. “Probably don’t need that anymore.” 

Didn’t need it in the first place. “So what do you think of real vampires, now that you’ve met one?”      

He scrunched one eye and got a solid look at me with the other. “You just seem like a regular guy. You haven’t called the cops on me… that’s real decent of you.” Nice of him to say, despite the fact that he’d trashed my living room. “And you’re skinnier than I thought a ‘pire would be. But you sure are a strong fucker.” He rubbed his wrists again. “Real strong.”

“Yeah… sorry about that.”

“Hey, I was trying to stab you in the heart. Guess a jacked wrist ain’t so bad. Wait till I tell my old lady about you… she’s gonna wet her panties when she finds out I met a real ‘pire. Probably be pissed that I tried to slay one, seeing as how she’s all hung up on that Fredward Mullins dude, like he’s her dream guy or something.” Aha… so had he gone through with it, this would have been a crime of passion, of sorts. I knew there had to be more to the story than just mobile ghoul extermination. “She’ll be totally bummed that you don’t sparkle like him.”