So You Might Be a Vampire

by Rodney V. Smith

  ***

  “I'm going to have to kill you Bob.”

  Beatrice was perched at the end of the bed, her long blonde hair hanging loosely down in front of her, a matted mess that bore no resemblance to the pride and joy she had so previously showed off. This was my first indication that the seemingly brainless girl I had once sat next to in Harry's office, that girl was gone, replaced by a complete psycho who now wanted me dead.

  It had been three weeks since the Hotel Astoria, two weeks since the attack at the club. Claude had pulled a vanishing act, his turn to tell me to fuck off, and I don't think he had even returned to the apartment since our big fight. In the three weeks since then, I had discovered a few things about myself, one of them being that much like quitting smoking, I had decided that I actually didn't want to have blood anymore. The urge hadn't vanished of course. Anybody who tells you that is a fucking liar. It was just that I had decided I didn't want to do it anymore. I wanted to be clean, and I was just not going to put myself in a situation where temptation would rear its ugly head and do nasty freaky things to me that I would love so much. Nope. Not me. Instead, I kept my head down. I went to work, I ignored Harry's calls, flirted with the ever volatile Sammy, walked by the diner, hoping to see Claude and went home before the sun came up, to an empty apartment where my best friend in the world wasn't around to share my small victory.

  The apartment had never felt so empty, and I had never felt so lonely. I hadn't ever felt like this, even after Jaime, but then again, I hadn't even tried to be sober around that time, so I had no idea what emotions I'd locked off and buried deeply. This time, being sober with my friend of fifteen years no longer in my corner, my constant cheerleader, the one person who would always call me on my shit and tell me how much it stank, without him there... It hurt. It was a dull aching hurt made worse by Louise's abandonment of me, not once but twice now. That was the twist of the knife, and it almost pushed me over the edge again.

  There was a moment riding up in the elevator with some redhead in a cool leather jacket, the kind of girl I favored, and the depression had just washed over me, overwhelmingly screaming in my ear. And I wanted to scream so badly, just scream and sink my teeth into her neck and just drink, knowing the oblivion that would come with it and the awesome sex that would inevitably follow. I fought the scream back, feeling the tears biting my eyes, the emotion rising up into my throat, clawing to get out--

  Maniacal laughter burst out of me then, a sharp short barking laugh that surprised the piss out of me and I know it scared the ever loving shit of the redhead by the way she jumped and then cowered in the corner as far away from me as possible. She was scared of the maniac in the elevator with her but scared for all of the wrong reasons. The first and most logical to be scared was, of course, being that she was riding an elevator with a strange man at five in the morning.

  This caused me to laugh some more, the laughter feeling good even though it was scary as shit and wasn't winning me any friends. I wanted to tell her that it was okay that I just had a really fucked up way of dealing with depression and maybe even expressing emotion, but I didn't dare.

  'Sorry,' I might have mumbled, but the girl was already pushing buttons, any button, any floor, just please God don't let her die tonight, not like this, not in the fucking elevator.

  The elevator dinged as the doors slid open, and the girl escaped, not daring to look back at the laughing maniac huddled into a corner of the elevator. I didn't care at that point if anyone saw me. It would have been better than being alone.

  Claude had picked the apartment, and the neighborhood, just to make sure I didn't have any excuses to fuck things up accidentally. Everything had been taken care of for me in this new place. Rent paid and bills non-existent for a time. A temporary arrangement until I got my shit sorted out. It was a much nicer place than anything I'd been used to and the neighbors were the very expensive kind. They loved Claude of course, since he charmed the socks off everyone, but they hated me on sight. It was like they could smell a junkie from a mile away. I didn't care at the time; I'd just rolled with it, glad that I had my friend there in my corner. Everything was going to be okay.

  I could slap past-me for my naivete.

  So Claude was gone, and I was alone when Beatrice showed up in my bedroom in the middle of the day, still dressed in her day-walker outfit and carrying the biggest fucking hand cannon I had ever seen.

  "I'm going to have to kill you Bob," she said and I just shrugged, just not giving a fuck. I still moved slow enough to not be a threat, so there's something to be said for self-preservation.

  "Does it have to be right this minute or can I get some coffee first?"

  Beatrice hadn't expected that. She cocked her head at me and then grinned the grin of the truly insane.

  "Can you make me a cup too?"

  "Will it stop you from killing me?"

  "I can always kill you after. What's a little murder between friends, right?"

  ***

  There is an art to making extra weak coffee so that there was still something resembling flavor and just a little bit of a kick that didn’t immediately cause a brain embolism in my fucked up and over sensitive vampire brain. Simple pleasures and habits are hard to kick, even if they had a high chance of either killing or fucking you up in a serious but non-permanent way. For me, it was like suddenly discovering I had a huge peanut allergy after eating peanuts for my entire life, and they were my favorite food of all time. Think about it: all of those little things you enjoy so much, eating spicy food, grabbing a large coffee on the way to work… All of those little habits are just a way to make you feel normal again, a way to remind you to be human. I needed that reminder more than ever, and I think a lot of different vampires had their own quirks and habits, even the ones that forgot a long time ago how good it felt to be human.

  My habit was coffee. It was coffee only in the loosest definition of the word, coffee that would be ashamed to show its face around the nearest Starbucks. It was coffee that would weep uncontrollably around a can of the blandest Maxwell House wishing it could be that strong. It was the essence of coffee, filtered and diluted through lots of water, just to make it drinkable to me. Claude had scoffed when I insisted on using his blend of extra-stinky beans that he’d presumably stolen off the back of a truck, to make my “weak-ass embarrassment of coffee." But even in its weakened state, I could still tell the difference between bad coffee and coffee that truly wanted to kill you gently with its exquisite flavor.

  The trick lay in the filtering. About four or five of the bamboo filters, the triangle ones that only true coffee snobs insisted on using. Then one teaspoon of the most exquisitely flavored coffee that required me to wear a gas mask (Claude got the really good shit direct from Columbia). Ten cups of water. Now set and watch it drip. The next step is very important: under no circumstances are you to drink this coffee if you happen to be a vampire. Not yet. You have to filter that shit through the filters again, this time without the coffee.

  Pour and sip ever so gently and pray that it won’t kill you.

  Beatrice watched this process with a fair amount of amusement, the gigantic hand cannon on the counter between us. She even stifled a laugh when I put on the thick black rubber-gloves and the gas mask to handle the coffee grinder.

  “You sure you don’t want some? It will put a bit of pep into your step.”

  “How can you be so fucking calm? I’m here to kill you, and you’re here offering me coffee like it’s a goddamn tea-party.”

  “I really couldn’t give a damn right now. Maybe in a week I’d care more, but right now, whatever. Just let me have my coffee first is all I’m saying.”

  Beatrice snorted and pushed her goggles back to the top of her head. Curiously she wore an eyepatch over the same eye that Louise had shot out. I must have reacted because she grinned at me.

  “You like it? I can give you one if you’d like.”

  “You gotta excuse me, there’s still a lot of s
hit I don’t know. Doesn’t it grow back? You know... when you heal?”

  Beatrice looked at me long and hard, considering, and I paused in my careful measuring of coffee wondering if she was just going to kill me right there and then and get on with her day. Instead, she reached down into her knee-high kick-ass leather boots and pulled out a gigantic Bowie Knife, the kind of knife Crocodile Dundee would have heartily approved. What the hell was it with this chick and over-sized weapons anyway?

  Beatrice held the knife up in front of her face, her eye focused on the blade, and I could breathe again, spared for another thirty minutes or however long she decided I wasn’t boring her.

  “Do you know that cunt Madame Vera sedates us, pumps us full of drugs when we’re in our boxes? Do you know why she does that? Don’t answer. Just shut up and let me tell you. You can feel it growing back. It’s this weird itch that just turns into pain and that pain turns into screaming locked inside a ball of misery that if you’re awake, you just want it to stop, and you just want to die right there. But then it stops hurting, the pain opening like a flower, blooming into something beautiful, something that you never thought was possible. And then you’re whole again through that entire experience, and it’s wonderful. It’s as close to tasting God that we will ever come.”

  I paused as I pushed the start button on the coffee-maker, suddenly without a doubt knowing what was coming next and understanding just how fucking insane Beatrice truly was.

  “So when I wake up, and my eye is back, I take my knife and I cut it right the fuck out. Every. Single. Day.”

  That dread I felt climbing up my back was somehow getting past the defenses of my depression. Even as down as I was, as fucked in the head by my own lack of worth, loneliness, whatever... my self-preservation was alive and kicking and it wanted my body to stay whole and alive. While the whole religion thing is nice for some people, I didn’t think I wanted to see the God that Beatrice was going around tasting.

  Coffee started to drip, and I turned carefully, calculating how far the gun on the table was, realizing that I had no chance in hell of getting to it, and then realizing that Beatrice was watching me make these calculations, and she was, in fact, waiting for me to do something.

  “Why were you trying to kill Louise?”

  “She’s been hiding under Harry’s nose for years now. I think that fact cheesed him off more than anything. He doesn’t like the Hunters, but he’s old-fashioned, set in his ways. Are you going to grab the gun or not?”

  “Nope, no gun for me.”

  “It will make this go quicker if you tried.”

  “I like your eyepatch.”

  “You’re a fucking liar. Go for the gun.”

  “I don’t want to die. I haven’t had my coffee yet.”

  “Fuck your coffee. Go for the gun. I haven’t killed anyone in two days, and I’m already getting bored.”

  That reminded me—

  “Oh hey! Coffee’s ready. You sure you don’t want a cup?”

  Beatrice glared at me as I poured a cup.

  “What are you planning Bob? Are you setting me up?”

  Oh, just fucking great: she thought I was smarter than I looked. That was a first. I hadn’t even thought of coming up with a plan until she had said something, and now she was expecting something brilliant. What a laugh. I grinned and shrugged.

  “Sorry Beatrice: I got nothing.”

  I finished stirring and took a nice big gulp of coffee.

  Remember what I said about the careful steps required in making the coffee? Yeah, I forgot the most important step, or maybe I didn’t pray hard enough. Oh, wait, I had it right the first time. I forgot to run it through the filters the second time.

  I started to say something else, but Beatrice was looking at me weird—

  Then the world went sideways as my coffee embolism kicked me in the brain and everything went away for a while.

  ***

  Searing pain.

  Deep in the black, there was a throbbing, a surging of pain that ebbed sharply, and then faded to a dull ache, almost like a heartbeat and the surge of blood through the vein—

  HOLY SHIT! What the fuck was that?

  An explosion of pain on my right side then, high in the shoulder, nothing dull about that at all and oh God it hurt so fucking much, make it stop who the fuck was that screaming, shut up shut up—

  Oh right. That was me screaming.

  I woke up staring at the hilt of Beatrice’s huge fucking knife sticking out of my right shoulder, the occasional spurt of arterial blood adding to the concert of pain. You don’t realize until it happens to you, how much pain is linked to the flow of blood and the beat of your heart. When the blood is escaping around tortured and much abused nerve endings, there is a temporary release where it doesn’t hurt quite so much, but then the heart pumps again and as more blood surges, here comes the pain -- oh God it hurts! The worst thing though was this weird feeling, this itch that felt like my body was trying to heal itself, but there was a goddamn KNIFE stuck into my shoulder—

  Wait a minute…

  I looked at my other shoulder.

  Apparently Beatrice carried two big fucking knives with her.

  I was pinned to the kitchen wall, Beatrice’s uncomfortably huge knives embedded hilt deep into both of my shoulders. The pain that had greeted me on waking had been Beatrice slamming the second knife into me, the first having been inserted while my brain still had me knocked out. Oh and she had decided to pin me two feet into the air, so all of my weight was resting on those knives and oh fucking hell it hurt.

  Beatrice looked surprised and then delighted to see that I was awake. She grabbed me by the face and looked deep in my eyes to see if I was all there. I tried to stifle a scream, but was too much of a pussy to prevent it coming out.

  “Do you want to fuck me Bob?”

  That was seriously the last thing I’d expected to hear. I shook my head in muted surprise, but that was a bad idea as pain ripped through my body with each movement. That didn’t deter Beatrice. She looked honestly hurt by my not wanting to fuck her.

  “WHY NOT?” She screamed into my face, getting right up close and personal, her spit spraying my face in crazy. It was then that I realized two things that took my mind completely off of my pain.

  First of all, Beatrice was stark naked. The only thing she was wearing was her eye patch which sat firmly on her face like a black scar of rage. It’s funny, because there was absolutely nothing erotic about the scene in any way whatsoever, no matter how aroused you are by beautiful psychotic blonde women with shapely bodies, perfectly perky breasts and a neat mound of blonde pubic hair. All of this was window dressing and covered in spatters and streaks of my blood. There was no arousal on my part, just a lot of pain, complete confusion and abject terror. There was no way I wanted to fuck her. I have a policy against honestly crazy chicks (not just the selfish drama queens, but the honestly mentally deranged or broken) and the one and only rule in that policy was a prohibition against fucking them.

  Beatrice yanked both of the knives out of my shoulders in a shocking display of brutal strength, and I crumpled to the floor, spraying arterial blood from one shoulder. I screamed all the way down, and even as I fell, I got complete confirmation of the second thing I had noticed about Beatrice.

  She was floating about two feet off the ground.

  I fucking hate Tuesdays.

  Beatrice turned in the air, arms going out to steady herself almost by reflex, and even as I felt my shoulders screaming as they finally began to repair the damage without any metal in the way, I could only wonder about how the hell was she even doing that?

  She brandished the twin knives and sneered down at me, a vision of psychotic beauty, and that movement caused her to sway and rock a little.

  “I’m going to make you want to fuck me Bob, and then I’m going to cut off your cock and feed it to you.”

  “Sounds like fun. Except, could we not do that last part?”

&n
bsp; Beatrice flung herself backward, and it was like watching an astronaut in zero-gravity as her momentum carried her toward the wall, and she expertly flung her legs around to hit the wall feet first. Then Beatrice launched herself across the room at me, knives at the ready.

  I’m going to pause here for a second and explain something about why vampires cannot fly and why this scene could not possibly happen, but yet it did. As you can tell, I survived, and no my cock wasn’t cut off and force fed to me, but it was mainly due to two things. One of those being that vampires cannot fly.

  It’s a logistical impossibility. You can spin all kinds of theories about hollow bones or some physical ability that specially allows for the vampires in your fantasy to fly. Sure, go ahead and spin whatever theory you want, but it’s bullshit. You cannot have the hollow bones and match that up to the super strength. Your average vampire isn’t Wolverine with the adamantium skeleton that supports the muscular structure. In fact, most of us aren’t super strong, we’re just stronger than most, and usually only in extreme cases where we’re in mortal danger or extremely pissed off. The whole super strength thing wouldn’t work so much in our day to day lives since we’d be like babies trying to learn how to do everything again without breaking everything in sight. Everyday objects were meant to be handled by a person of average strength, so imagine if someone with the strength of ten people, all of the time, tried to use a fork without practicing (stabs themselves in the face) or tried to pick up a beer stein (glass shatters, beer foul committed). It just doesn’t work.

  This aside is about flying though, so let’s stick to that. I just know some of you are going to be bringing up all kinds of arguments, so as the only vampire here, and thus the only expert in the field (not you) I’m only going to tell you once: shut up about your theories. They’re all wrong.

  Beatrice was a prime example of this being all wrong. She wasn’t some fucking bird, having to grow wings and flap about the room like a deranged hummingbird. The physical impossibility aside, it just wasn’t practical. And once again: enough with the bat thing. That’s just fucking crazy talk. Nobody can change their bodies into a hundred tiny creatures of a different mass, just to fucking fly! And for fuck’s sake, do not mention any “sparkly vampire” shit and how they can jump. Seriously?