“You want to know what I think?” It didn't matter if Nate wanted to know. "That Tom, he's no good for her and it's tearing her apart. But she sees a whole life ahead of her. The only thing my intervention would do is sow a rift in blood."
"Su, I don't think this is a plain old hurting heart."
A vibe Suze gave off let Nate know that he knew nothing. Considering himself someone who generally knew nothing, Nate took comfort in the fact that admitting your ignorance is the first step on the road to wisdom. Yet, Nate did not feel wise today. He felt like the whole family had come under some crazy spell. He felt like some hobo's blood was staining the passenger seat of a car he was leasing.
It was due time to head over to the garage and hammer in some beers with his favorite Saturday drinking buddy: himself. While on his way out, he saw Suze line up a fully dressed Luke in front of the fire place for a nice formal photo. Over his shoulder, he caught a flash from her smartphone camera.
Despite the high noon sun, Shana was asleep basically as soon as she hit the bed, maybe even a moment before, slipping straight from waking life into slumber land as if consciousness were a low-level window she just fell out of.
Chapter Two
The Red Rocket Diner was empty except for a waitress. There must have been others inside the restaurant, at least back in the kitchen. Someone had to be preparing the food, someone cleaning the dishes. But there was only one sound Shana heard and that was an insistent clicking, like two clocks keeping unsteady time, falling in and out of sync. A man appeared from nowhere with a plate of food. He was dressed in slacks and a white shirt, tie tucked in between buttons. The leather jacket he wore over this ensemble evoked the image, as Shana would later recount, of a Jehovah's Witness who was converted to the faith through some sort of penitentiary outreach initiative.
The plate held three eggs in their shells, maraschino cherries on top of a biscuit, a Polish sausage, a head of garlic. This wasn't what Shana ordered. She looked up to protest and found the Witness smoking a cigarette.
"You can't––"
His eyes broke into her and he simply gestured with them downwards. She cracked one egg, covering the biscuit and cherry in orange goop, ingesting the mess in one bite. Chewing, she looked up again. His stare had not adjusted a bit. She cracked the second egg over the Polish and stared at the pink slime running down the meat's encasing. It formed a blob around the underside of the sausage and the very idea of putting any bit of this inside herself was repulsive.
"Come." The man's voice was much too high. He beckoned her with his middle and ring finger. The pinky was missing, yet absorbed all of Shana's attention. The the vinyl cushion on the booth squeaked as the Witness moved in. "Come."
Blood drained from Shana's head when she stood, inducing a little oxygen-deprived high. She slid into the seat next to him until her bare shoulder touched the man's leather. She found herself totally nude. The man's eyes did not drift to her bush, but remained on the plate of food.
"Have you ever cracked an egg with another?"
Still, nothing sounded in the restaurant but that asynchronous tick. The air was stagnant, thick on Shana's bare skin. The man touched Shana's forearm and picked it up, clutching either side with his forefinger and thumb. Her fingers grabbed the narrow end of the egg, his the rounder one. Magnetically linked by this unfertilized embryo, they smacked the egg against the edge of the oblong plate in perfect unison. Opaque red ooze drenched the whole of the garlic head, saturating its papery skin. Shana wished to look her table mate in the eyes, to ease herself by way of some nonverbal explanation, some sign that this did not mean what she thought, whatever it was that she thought. Frankly, she had no idea.
"You would like for me to take you," he said. He still only stared at the garlic.
"Yes," Shana confirmed through a wisp of breath.
"Why would you like for me to take you?"
Shana only swallowed. She could feel the cold of the vinyl booth thanks to the thin dribble of liquid on the underside of her thigh.
"You wish for me to take you because you have never cracked an egg with another before.” The Witness finally looked at her, not examining her bare body, but instead her entire face, taking a mental scan from the chin up as if he planned on sketching this visage later on.
Shana reached into the a pocket inside the leather jacket and pulled out a fourth egg, this one larger than the others. She placed it in his pinky-less hand and crawled atop the table. She placed herself prone on her hands and knees, as if praying eastwards in a mosque, and took the egg from the Witness's hand. The narrow part of the egg perched perfectly in taut valley cleaving her buttocks.
In anticipation, her breathing turned tonal like some sort of cooing hyena. Yet the table mate simply stared at the plate of fallen food.
"I wish for you to take me." At this command he was inside of her. His legs must have been abnormally long in order get inside of her without lowering her hips at all.
As he thrust with precise gyrations and the more his member’s pulsations grew mechanical, the more Shana lost herself in this clockwork, the more the egg wobbled back and forth in evermore precarious balance. He hit some spot and steam from Shana's breath fogged the salt shaker right in front of her face.
"Touch me." He vigorously pawed the front of her labia. The egg wobbled more violently. She feared for the unborn life that would be lost were that egg to break. It wobbled more, yet deeper she receded into her own head, into some velvet sauna filling with steam bliss. As rigid as her lover’s remained, his cock seemed to slither every which way, ticking every conceivable corner and even those she could not conceive of. The egg rocked, starting to fall backwards towards his pelvis. She could not bring herself to call "no" aloud. Instead, she let him continue, with the egg growing ever more unsettled. The man machine made the egg finally lose root and start tumbling backwards down her butt. He craned over her to rub her scalp through her hair, to bite her ear lobe. In the process, the egg cracked into her anus and the ooze enveloped their genitalia like a sensual amniotic fluid. She let out an orgasmic roar, a coyote howling at the blood moon. This howl rattled the whole house. Suze ran to Shana's bed, finding her sister writhing in sweat soaked bedsheets, bellowing a sound that was half cry, half climax. Entering the room slowly so as to not induce panic were her sister to wake in that moment, Suze eased onto the side of the bed, planting her hand on Shana's shoulder. The sister's eyes opened but it was damn near a minute before Shana realized she was awake.
"It's dark outside."
"That it is, hun."
"How long was I out?"
"About 11 hours. I think your probably good and rested for the night."
Shana looked at her sister, quickly embarrassed. "That sound... Did I make it in this life? Did it wake Luke?"
"Oh I gave Luke half an Ambien so that he'll be good and rested for tomorrow." Disquiet racked Shana's face. "Hun, I don't think Tom gets the best out of you." Suze played with Shana's bangs, something that had comforted the both of them since they were small. "Now I'm not here to tell you what's best for you, but I'm here when you need to talk about what's best for you, ok?"
Shana nodded. "I need a few, Suze."
Had Suze not turned behind her as she left the room, Shana's life may have ended up quite different. But that determinate split second transpired as it did and, as she looked back from the closing door, Suze saw two parallel scratches. She immediately knew that they came from teeth, for she saw the same exact ones when Shana was 18. Fury coursed through her veins, but the bile that rose to her throat obstructed the pathway of any words. Instead, she stood for a moment in silence, as her sister snuggled up in the sheets.
Chapter Three
There was a day when Suze was 22 and Shana was 18 when the elder became all too aware of who this Baker was and what he was about. Despite her young age at the time, Suze was as headstrong and driven as a woman ten years her senior. Much of this had to do with the parenting that fell in her
lap so often for so many years. Their Mother had a habit of up and leaving when parenting two children was just too much. She would return in a few days or a few weeks. Contact was sparse. While a loving man, their father was more likely found drinking at the VFW than on the couch watching made-for-TV movies with his daughters.
As such, Suze felt maternal concern for Shana from a young age. Always a complex case, Shana was an overachiever in school yet never seemed to run with the right crowd outside of it. For a while, Suze felt that Shana lingering in a graveyard was better than her lingering in an alleyway. When Shana revealed she was spending so much time there because of a boy, Suze found it strange but acknowledged that love had peculiar ways. But then she heard something grim from her pal Rosa.
Rosa and Suze met hanging out at the same biker bar. They shared an affinity for a greasy guy on a hog and would take turns playing one another's wing lady. The bar was actually where Suze met Nate, even though Nate's biking days would soon end after a nasty spill left him with a bad back. Anyway, Rosa was a practitioner of Santeria, a Voudon-like faith popular in Central America and the Caribbean. Its rituals involve candles, incantations and the occasional sacrifice of this or that livestock.
In fact, Suze's favorite nights at the bar were the ones when Rosa would attract a sizable crowd with her tales of zombies and supernatural happenings which she had learned about through her worship community. One night, Rosa told of a woman who went missing years back after she was seduced by a mysterious man. He would only really show himself to her in the twilight. Police said he was a drifter, the Santerians believed he was a blood sucker.
After a ritual in Lake View Cemetery one night, when the Santerians sacrificed a live goat, Rosa returned to the site after congregation had dispersed in search of her car keys. Two gaunt figures were dragging a woman away by her arms. The woman was twitching, writhing, unable to post up on her own two feet. In the trio's wake was the goat, repositioned from where the worshippers had left it. As any person in her right mind would, Rosa stepped carefully so as not to attract attention from the receding trio. But her heart sank when the woman, in whatever excruciating throes gripped her, wrenched her head around and shrieked at Rosa. Goat's blood caked the woman's maw, and Rosa recognized the face from the ‘Missing Persons’ ads a few years before. But in the time since the disappearance, the woman's eyes had grown vacant, her skin sallow, her canine teeth long.
The vampire, Rosa explained, is susceptible to the same survivalist follies as the typical mortal human. Just as a stranged sailor may be driven to drink the very salt water which would dehydrate him further, the starving vampire has been known to sample whatever blood is accessible. No blood but a human's sustains a vampire. In fact, the blood of any other species is as good as toxic. If the vampire is lucky, it will purge the intake after some period, and if not, that blood will corrode its undead insides like battery acid in a paper cup.
Rosa said a lot of shit to make sure only the gnarliest, most depraved bikers remained at the end of her tales. Those were usually the only ones she found, that would fist her by the dumpster or tie her to a bike in such a way that they could ride while fucking. So Suze only half believed her, but she couldn't shake the feeling that her sister was in a similar danger as the girl in Rosa's story, whether Backer was a vampire or not.
In her motherly way, Suze passed the rumor forward to Shana, which prompted Shana to roll her eyes and lock herself in her room for the rest of the night. When she found Shana crying in the front yard one night, the night that Baker initially tried to bite her, to drink her blood by the Haserot Angel, she hugged her sister and reminded her that a man who loves you will not try to take anything from you.
Untold emotions, new and old alike, rushed through Suze's head as she sat on the edge of Shana's bed. In her adult life, in her time as a wife and mother, she had not felt an anger so seething and adolescent as the one she felt now. Part of this anger was against herself, for not coming down harder on her sister's congress with the undead. On the precipice of giving her sister a good talking to, Nate rushed into the room huffing. Fear was not in his eyes as much as all over his face like grease paint.
"Honey. Come on."
"One second, I just..."
"Suzanne, now." It was the quiver in his voice which persuaded his wife. Her brow crested in concern and she followed.
Affixed to the front door was a map of Cleveland, with various red dots marking areas of a significance which the couple could not discern. Based on the device pinning the map to the door, an ice pick, they were sure that these landmarks were of the utmost grim nature. For the sake of their son's peace of mind on the eve of his first communion, they decided to place the ice pick and map in a plastic bag and hold off on calling the police.
Chapter Four
Around 9 PM, Shana slipped out. She managed to make it to the cemetery by 9:45, just in time to catch Baker closing up his mausoleum. The vampire was casually clad in a Budweiser branded jacket that seemed to date back to the 40s. Like a drone bee visiting its queen, Shana was drawn to her lover's outline. Had she been aware of anything besides her lover, she would have noticed that her panties were damp.
In fact, Baker was caught off guard when he found himself in the middle of a long kiss. This visit was unexpected, and somehow he didn't even notice her sneak up. Nothing turned Baker on quite like Shana's eyes when she was in a trance state, wholly given over to him, this post-life being. He ran his icy hand against her thigh and her knees buckled. He caught her by the armpits, a zone swiftly transmuted erogenous by the vampire's touch. Breath came from deep inside her.
The only thing Shana desired in this earthly life was to be ravaged by the vampire. Running from Baker's bite the previous night did not liberate her from the grip of mortal danger. Instead, it left her longing for some fulfillment which she could not define. While her living, breathing body was repulsed by the vampire's nip into her pulmonary––his feast on her blood––a ravenous death drive colonized her libido. The instinct to survive as a mortal and her acute thirst for profound pleasure were sworn nemeses. In this moment, the hedonism was winning.
Clothing started to peel off, but Baker laid his hand on her bare breast in a halting motion. The corpse-cold palm on her nipple induced a minuscule climax. "Not now."
Shana pressed his hand against her breast and she gasped as he gave a gentle squeeze.
"Babe I've gotta go. Gonna be late."
Breathlessly she bellowed, "late?"
"Night school. Don't want to spend my eternity doing bitch work at the power plant." A dagger turned in Shana's belly. "Aw, lighten up. I'm gonna be moving up on this world. Aren't you happy for me?"
Shana caught herself in this state, and self-awareness shocked her into consciousness. "Yes."
"We can pick this up later."
"Yes. Go to school."
Baker gave her a little kiss and thought to himself, “You are mine: my love, my feast.” But he said, "I will leave now."
Baker climbed into his truck. The closest garment to Shana when she sunk to the ground was her shawl. She covered her chest, leaned against the mausoleum and wept. She wept for the life back east she was so ready to leave behind, for the power she forfeited to this man she had left behind so long ago. She wept for the fact that control seemed to be a distant memory, a talent lost like violin to an amputee.
So she walked. She roamed Cleveland, taking a tour of its boarded up houses––some rather haunted looking, some just sad in their desertion––and its desolate 24/7 convenience stores.
Lust unfulfilled and body wired from the 11-hour nap she took earlier in the day, no amount of distance covered would possibly tire out her body. But as her feet wandered, so did her mind, and by the time the sun started to color the night sky a lighter hue, a magenta, she was no longer fixated on her own futility.
When she arrived back at the family home, Shana still felt as awake as if she had gotten a full night sleep. Absolving Suze of some morn
ing responsibilities, Shana took it upon herself to root through the pantry and whip up some breakfast. The makings were there for pancakes, eggs, breakfast sausage. Any grogginess the family felt upon waking that Sunday morning was dissolved in a heap of protein and carbs. The only thing Suze had to worry about was the coffee, since Shana didn’t know how to work a stovetop percolator. This morning found Suze a blank slate, her anger over Shana and Baker not so much dissipated as totally forgotten. They had a very nice breakfast together.
Suze got Luke all dressed up again, more quickly and with a lot less pain than for the photo session yesterday. Nate dressed up in a smart suit that he made sure to only wear three times a year to prevent wear, and next to his son you’d swear that they were traveling from town to town trying to sell tonics in an old timey medicine show.
“Now remember, honey. Don’t just snatch that wafer like you haven’t eaten in a week. Receive communion by making a throne: one hand under the other to receive our great king.”
“Yes, Mom.”
The sisters, oddly enough, matched perfectly, wearing dresses cropped close, ornamented with lace. They wore silver necklaces and tasteful flats. Black, perhaps hereditarily, made the sisters elegant. They took turns adjusting one another’s hair, suggesting little make-up tweaks.
“And remember, Luke, to give a little bow when the person before you is receiving communion. You don’t want to bump your head into the dish of wafers and make that poor priest drop it.”
“Will I go to Heck if I do that?”
Suze chuckled. “No! But you’ll hold things up for everyone else and they might wish you were going to Heck.”
“Mike Haley says if make the priest mad you go to Heck.”
“We’ll see if the Haleys even show up today, hun.”
Before they all departed for the cathedral, Suze did a quick workout in the basement, wishing she had some time to hit the gym. Well, it's always hard to get over there with company over.
The Naughty Collection Page 17