Unmade: A Neo-Nihilist Vampire Tale (18 page)

He dropped to
his knees to get better leverage, then he brought his hand down. He didn’t put
enough energy into his strike and the stake glanced off of Earl’s sternum. He
raised his hand to do it again.

“Put some
muscle behind it. Use that vampire strength.”

He brought his
arm down, putting all of his weight behind the strike and the stake cracked
Earl’s breastbone penetrating a little bit into the tough muscle of the heart.

“I think it’s
in there.”

The Old
Soldier thought for a second and then said, “You better do it again. Get it all
the way in this time.”

He raised his
arm for a third strike and just as he was about to pounce the Old Soldier
asked, “You got a good grip? You got to have a good grip”

“Yeah, I got a
good grip. Shut up.”

He raised his
arm again and paused just for a second to make sure that the Old Soldier didn’t
have any more helpful hints. The Old Soldier said nothing and he brought his
arm down. He felt the thick fibrous muscle of the heart split at the now dull
tip of the stake and sink in to the point where the stake ceased to be
sharpened and resumed the rectangular shape of a two by four. Earl had long
been dead and his body did not burst into flames, or explode or anything else.
He just laid there as the green flecks faded in his eyes.

They grabbed
their things and they left. The old man got drunk on some brew that he had
stolen along the way. He watched and waited at the window, and when the sky
started to lighten, he crawled into his coffin and slept the day away.

            He
wondered how long he had been dead for. How long had he not been alive?
Technically his life had ended when he had slept with the dark angel from
Beelzebub’s, but he thought that his life had ended before that. His life had
ended when his wife and daughter had died, when the twisted metal of the car
had slammed into a tree after being run off the road by a drunk driver; that’s
when his life had ended.

            He
was dead. What did that mean? He was still walking, occasionally talking, and
now he was killing people or vampires or whatever the hell you wanted to call
them. Would he pay for these actions in the afterlife, or was a man free from
sin the moment they ceased being alive? If he was dead, did anything he did get
entered on the tally sheet of life, one slain bouncer, one negative mark? Could
he smoke, drink, and fuck all day and not have any negative repercussions? He
supposed he couldn’t drink, not alcohol anyway.

            He
felt like a man freed from all responsibility. He didn’t have to do a thing. He
could sit in his coffin and rot and it wouldn’t matter. He was already dead. He
could go out and burn down a forest and it wouldn’t matter. He could break into
a pre-school and slaughter everyone there, and it wouldn’t matter. He was dead.
He couldn’t really do anything. Maybe he didn’t even want to do anything.

            The
darkness of the coffin coalesced into a gray haze where his thoughts were
composed into a deadly list of justifications. Somewhere in the back of his
head, there was a doubt, a growing doubt, about the justness of his current
course of action, and his mind struggled to keep those thoughts in the back.

            He
was dead, a condition that he had sought for quite a while, and yet he felt
cheated. He felt wronged; wronged by the people that had taken his family,
wronged by the woman that had taken his life and left him an empty shell,
wronged by the world itself.

            He
smiled at the irony of finding purpose after dying. He marveled at the
absurdity of it all. A man who courts death, finds it and realizes that he
finally has a purpose. He was going to kill them, kill them all, so that they
couldn’t cheat anyone else of death, and if he died a second time… well, then
he won either way.

            His
mind made up and all objections shoved into the overstuffed closet of his mind,
he lifted the coffin door sensing the subtle change in temperature that marked
the shift from day to dusk. He stood up and breathed a deep breath of the
apartment’s atmosphere. It refreshed his nostrils wiping away the residual reek
of his coffin, which smelled like a car that had been vomited in and left in
the sun for a day. The air was good and he was ready for more.

The Old
Soldier still laid on the floor where he had left him, curled up in a pile of
beer cans and crushed out cigarette butts. He smelled like a human match. His
face was red, still blotchy with alcohol.  His hands were dark mitts of
wrinkles and dirt that ended in stubby little fingers, adorned with thin slivers
of dirty fingernails. A string of drool was currently slugging its way from his
babbling lips and to the increasingly dirty carpet. He muttered the name
Lucinda before reverting to his silent, but deep, breathing.

He let the Old
Soldier sleep a little longer before kicking him awake.

            The
next few nights were for information gathering. The Old Soldier laid low in the
apartment as he went about becoming a regular at Beelzebub’s. He was slow to
fit in, especially because he couldn’t drink the alcohol without getting sick.
The smell alone was enough to make his throat contract and his insides bubble.
He would nurse the drink for a few minutes and then take it to the bathroom,
where he would discreetly dump it down the toilet.

            He
eyed the patrons of Beelzebub’s as inconspicuously as possible. The first
night, there had been a few cops wandering around talking about the incident
the night before. Most of the regulars, and he spotted them immediately, were
shaken up, but not shaken up enough to avoid their favorite watering hole for a
night. The cops gave him the once over, but after a few perfunctory questions,
they left him alone. He supposed he didn’t much look like the sixty-year-old
bum that the sketch artist had drawn. He would have to remember to tell the Old
Soldier to ditch the army jacket and get himself a shave.

            The
next night wasn’t any more exciting. There weren’t many bizarre characters in
the bar. The majority of the place’s population seemed to be composed of Stanks
and business people that liked to slum it a little bit. The Stanks huddled over
their pints of microbrew, peering into their futures, only looking up every now
and then to caress the bartender with their eyes. The business men stood around
like roosters at the hen house. They didn’t drink like normal people; they had
stances. One of the regular businessmen stood around with his right foot
balanced on the brass pole that ran down the bottom of the bar as he stood
perpendicular to it. His right hand steadied him in his precarious position as
his left tipped his glass into his throat. He would eye the inside of the bar
deliberately, searching but never finding what he was looking for. The other
businessmen seemed to have stances and poses just as ridiculous. They looked
like models that he had seen on TV, models who’s every glance and gesture
reeked of nonchalance, but still left behind a slimy trail of emptiness and
counterfeit leisure.

            The
bartender was just as the Old Soldier had described her. Even through the sadness
and pain of the first few nights, he could tell that she was trying to do her
best for her customers and that the Stanks and businessmen that clung to the
bar genuinely appreciated her. Her eyes were ringed by dark circles and filled
with red veins the first couple of nights, so he didn’t press too hard in
forcing himself into the fold as a regular.

            No
one really talked about what had happened to Earl the bouncer. Everyone knew.
There was no way you couldn’t notice skinny Mike standing watch at the front
door, looking out of place in the fond remembrance of Earl’s bulk.

            He
just laid low and listened to the banter of the regulars. There was nothing new
there. No tantalizing vampire info, just the typical glut of barroom complaints
and laments, people complaining about jobs, women, men, the toilet being
clogged, Mexicans, the President… basically anything that couldn’t be helped.

            Except
for the bartender, no one really approached him or said a word to him, which
was good. He didn’t want too many friends in a place like this, especially not
with what he was planning to do to some of the lucky frequenters of the
establishment.

            He
finally caught a break on the third night when a familiar face wandered into
the bar.

            She
was there, not the one with the green-flecked, brown eyes, but the one with the
copper hair. His dark angel’s friend from the stage show wandered in looking
just a little different than she had the one night he had seen her. She was no
longer dressed like a whore in a fetish porno. Now she was dressed like a
bohemian Skank with a dark streak. She wore a black skirt that came all the way
down to her shins, a black tank top, and a knit black shawl that hung over her
shoulders but still showed her pale skin through the openings in the material.
Her copper hair hung loose and stopped just above her shoulders.  Her face was
almost white, not the shiny healthy white, but the pale white of caked on
make-up. Her eyes were surrounded by black make-up that ran at the corner of
her eyes as if she had been crying for some time. She looked like she was going
to a funeral.

            He
could see a myriad of silver rings adorning her fingers as she tapped them on
the bar. Lucinda, the bartender made her way and they greeted each other with
familiar smiles and small talk that was designed to skirt around the open wound
of recent happenings.

            She
ordered something, he didn’t care what, but she sipped it slow and that was to
his liking. He needed some time to think about his priorities and his approach,
and the longer she nursed her drink, the more time he would have.

            He
didn’t want to just go up to her in the bar and start talking to her. He needed
more than just simple conversation. He needed information, an “in” to start the
game. He also needed to get her away from Beelzebub’s. It would do no good to
be seen leaving with her. He finally figured out what he needed to do, and he
made his move as she finished her first drink.

            He
moved to her side and stood in that awkward half pose that people adopt when
the bar is too crowded and you have to turn sideways just to keep your hand on
the bar and so that the bartender will notice you. He wanted to be close to
her. He needed to make everything seem like a chance encounter.

            He
stood next to her waiting for Lucinda to take notice of him and take his next
drink order. The drink he had ordered earlier now stood neglected and sweating
at the opposite end of the bar.

            He
spoke first, breaking the ice and hoping to not be shot down outright. This was
all still new to him. “Hi. What are you drinking?”

            She
glared at him with the red rims of the tired or sad. “What does it matter?”

            He
smiled as he felt his imaginary feet slip into his imaginary pimp shoes; he
felt the joy of the game wash over his body and mind. He was now engaged in the
tinkering, tottering game of barrier breaking; the practice of stripping down a
woman’s guards until they are ready to give you the keys to their car, or at
least their bedroom. While frequently, the game didn’t go as well as all of
that, you could usually get a phone number at least and this is what he was
after.

            “Well,
it matters because I saw you come in and I said to myself, ‘What a shame, such
a pretty girl with such sad eyes.’ And then I thought to myself, ‘You know
what? You haven’t done your good deed for the day.’ The night isn’t getting any
younger and I thought we could help each other. I do you a favor and you help
me out with my one good deed a day addiction. Does that seem fair?”

            She
looked at him, measuring him with the mental scale that existed in all girls’
heads, the flirtation scale. On one side of the scale was the girl’s patience
on the other side of the scale was his bullshit. In his mind, he hoped she had
one heaping helping of patience because he had just laid the bullshit on pretty
thick. She must have had the patience of a saint because, instead of telling
him to get lost, she replied, “I suppose that seems fair. You seem harmless
enough. I’m drinking Merlot.”

            Lucinda
made her way down the line dealing spirits like a blackjack dealer in Vegas.
She stopped by to see if he needed another hit, and he decided to double down,
a glass of Merlot for the lady and a Jack and Coke for him. Lucinda poured the
wine from a glass bottle that was left sitting on the counter un-chilled. He
had never been a wine drinker, so he didn’t know if that was normal or not.

            The
copper-haired girl took a sip from her Merlot and, as her lips receded from the
lip of her glass, he could see tiny stains of red on her upper lip. He watched
closely trying to figure out if she was actually drinking the wine or just
pretending. At the same time, he was trying to appear as normal as possible
himself. Luckily, his Jack and Coke had arrived with a straw, which he
constantly played with. Whenever the girl would turn away from him or stare off
into space, he would place his finger over the end of the straw, locking the
air pressure in place as well as a little bit of liquid. Quickly, he would hold
the end of the straw over the bar floor, remove his finger, let the liquid
slide out of the straw, and replace it back in his drink.

            Their
conversation dripped along like syrup out of a freshly tapped maple tree. She
genuinely appeared to be sad and pulling any information from her was like
pulling teeth. He decided to move onto the tried and true method of pretending
that everything the girl said was interesting and prodding with follow up
questions. For instance, if the girl said she worked at the mall, he might ask,
“Which mall.” The beauty of this method was that he kept her talking and giving
information, just as he remained a total mystery.