by Jackie Rose
As for the First Lady herself, her witchcraft had transformed several of her most ferocious black cats into Secret Service agents. They surrounded her husband constantly, while also guarding other high-profile vampires like Count Victor Vyrdelek, his wife Tiffany Golden, and, of course, Count Dracula himself, with his Countess Ellen Reinecke.
And as for Jimmy Sanford, the undead movie star, he already had a ring of human bodyguards, surrounding himself and his bride Simona. In their sheer desperation, he and his young fellow celebrities had been going out on speaking tours, urging their fans to support Draculacare despite all its problems. But they had usually been booed off the stages…and, in some cases, driven off by pitchforks, not to mention garlic and crosses hurled at them as they fled.
Needless to say, the vampires were not at all happy about their current crisis, which was the worst they had faced since Bram Stoker had written his dreadful libel Dracula.
Count Victor was determined to face it like a man…or an undead male, anyway. “I have been fighting off peasants through all of my lifetimes!” Count Victor exclaimed to his countess. “I need no protection from them now!”
“You shouldn’t call them peasants,” Tiffany objected, like the good left-winger than she still was. “They are decent citizens who have been misled by right-wing rabble-rousers.”
“Whatever you call them! The only reason so many of them are ready to riot against us, is that they are angry because Draculacare has failed so badly that they are not able to join us undead themselves!”
Tiffany sighed, realizing all too well that it was all too true. Their archenemy, the Speaker of the House, was openly launching the attack against them.
“They called it the Eternal Care Act,” Rep. Lee shouted at his rallies, while pitchforks and banners waved above him. “But that was only a trick, to make you accept these evil undead creatures…and their werewolf and zombie and banshee and wicked witch friends, along with them. Although I should not be calling them friends…when they are fiends!” As always, he was greeted by a mighty roar.
He had counted on all the right-wing TV and radio commentators to support him, and was surprised when people like Mr. Bill refused to do so.
“I have attacked them constantly and very sincerely, as you know,” the talk-show host explained, when they met privately together. “But I would not want them dead! For one thing, I am not about to call for murder…and for another, attacking those blood drinkers is my bread and butter. If they were gone, I would have to find another target. Of course, if you wanted to rally at the White House in a protest march, then I would be happy to cover it.”
“I have thought of that already,” the Speaker responded. “But I have thought of an even more drastic action, which you would certainly support. We all remember the Government Shutdown over Obamacare…”
“Yes,” Mr. Bill replied, wincing. “We certainly do. The public practically was waving pitchforks…against the conservative Congressmen who had caused it.”
“Yes, well,” the Speaker retorted. “I agree that that did not work out just the way we had planned.”
More loudly, he proclaimed, “But this time, we will have a Sunset Shutdown…meaning that no government employees will work after dark. And that includes poll watchers, counting votes, and that means no elections, especially for the undead candidates and their supporters.”
For once, Mr. Bill was at a loss for words. “You mean…you mean…” he finally managed to gasp.
“Exactly! It means that we will have no more undead voters running our government, but only fine, decent, living human beings. Just to start with, we will shut down all the public electrical power services, including street lights and traffic lights as well. Let’s see how well those creatures of darkness will be able to get along when it’s really pitch dark.”
* * * *
Fortunately for the undead, the speaker had made one big mistake. The Sunset Shutdown had deprived the undead of their power and influence, true…but it harmed a lot of living people along the way.
Thanks largely to the Eternal Care Act, there were now a lot more undead citizens around than anyone had expected. The un-undead realized, too late, that they themselves had been relying on them.
For example, undead Realtors like Crina Vyrdelek no longer had any way of showing properties to prospective homebuyers, since she could no longer show anything to anyone at night. That meant, of course, that the home sellers were left in the lurch.
Crina’s former sister wife and current bodyguard Yvlenia faced the same dilemma, since she had to stay at home…or, more accurately, in her coffin…while the First Lady kept haunting the animal shelters without her protection, desperately looking for more black cats to transform into Secret Service guards. Naturally, all those newly hired agents caused a drain on the federal budget.
And, of course, many open-all-night businesses of all kinds were no longer open at all, without their undead night staffs.
Under these circumstances, Congressman George Zakorsky (D-Calif) would have been glad to lead his undead brothers and sisters in an all-out effort at shutting down the shutdown, and many of the un-undead would have joined them. But thanks to the Sunset Shutdown, it was very hard for him to lead anyone else anywhere at all.
He would have been shouted down if he had tried to address the public…which, he knew, he could not have done anyway, because the Sunset Shutdown was keeping him in his grave all night. He suggested holding rallies by candlelight…but that, as the Speaker soon responded, would have definitely been against the fire safety laws.
His bride, the banshee, had no such problem, since she was on call at any time during the night or day. But since death so often came after dark, the dying often had to do without her services, because it was so hard to find their deathbeds in the pitch-black night.
Her patrons most certainly included the upper-class Irish-Americans who had provided so many generous campaign contributions. They all knew that having a banshee wail for your relatives was about as high class as you could get, and were glad to pay for the privilege…as long as was available.
Putting it bluntly, since so many Undead Americans and their clients now had so little money to spend, the entire economy suffered…including many pitchfork-wavers, who found layoff notices in their pockets, along with the crosses and garlic.
So the public soon turned against the Sunset Shutdown…while protesting even more angrily against the government’s crashing failure to provide Draculacare, which would have given everyone access to the Eternal Care Act.
Clearly, something had to be done. And as the most obvious way of doing it, the public started begging for help from the most famous Undead Transylvanian-American of all…namely… Dracula!
(At the very name of Dracula, we would normally call for a flash of lightning and burst of thunder here. But too many weather forecasters had already decided join the Undead, as a way of maintaining their eternally youthful appearances, so now they could not work at night either. We need hardly add what that had done to 24-hour weather reports, which were now reduced to 12 hours at best).
Chapter Six
“Ellen, you are mad!” Dracula told his spouse. “We cannot abandon Draculacare and end the Sunset Shutdown in such a simple way, no matter how many people are pleading for us to do it. Otherwise, we would have tried it long ago.”
“No, we would not,” she answered patiently, between sips of her blood-bank cocktail.
“But it is too simple!” he objected, pulling himself straight up in his anger, thus avoiding his usual slouch. “The Draculacare Web site keeps rejecting my password no matter how many times I tried to change it. I used Dracula and Vampire and Vyrdelek and Tepes and even Vlad Tepes, and every other version I could remember of my name, followed by numbers up to one million nine hundred ninety-nine thousand and nine hundred ninety-nine.
“But always, it informed me that the password is incorrect. Some people still say that I am…Dracula is the world’s mo
st frightening phrase, but it can’t hold a candle to the password is incorrect, leaving you locked out of your computer completely.”
In a louder voice, he went on, “The same thing is happening all over the country! No wonder people are waving pitchforks and trying to hunt us down…whenever they are not pleading for me to help them, naturally. Draculacare was named after me in the first place, so they blame me for everything that’s gone wrong with it. That’s why we have all those Secret Service agents running around our house, in the form of black cats. The only thing the public hates any worse than Draculacare is the Sunset Shutdown, which was meant to destroy us but is ruining the whole economy instead. And you think you could save us all in such a simple way.”
Her cheeks would have turned red with anger, if she had not been a vampire herself, with the trademark pale complexion. “It is so simple that no one has tried it…yet it is the most obvious way of curing a computer glitch. I learned that much while I was a teacher, typing out reports all the time. So why not let me just try it?”
In a more seductive tone, she added, “You know that we Vampire Brides can keep our own Sires under the Eternal Care Act…so we have every reason to support it. Besides the fact that the whole country is waving pitchforks, garlic and crosses at you and every other known vampire…except for the ones who wave Stars of David and Crescents instead.”
“Well, all right then,” he muttered. “Just lead the way upstairs.”
Eagerly, she jumped up to do so, as he carried a candle behind her. Those candles had always been a tradition, he knew…but he had reached the point where he was much more accustomed to using batteries, like the ones that kept his computer running…when it felt like running at all.
“It will never work,” he muttered, as she sat down in front of the machine. Without answering, she pushed the button that shut the computer down.
“One chimpanzee-two chimpanzee-three chimpanzee-four chimpanzee—” she murmured, as she counted out ten suspenseful seconds. She would have murmured a prayer, except that she remembered, just in time, that she was not supposed to so.
When the wait was over, she pressed the on button again, entered her Sire’s name and asked him what password he wanted to enter after it.
“Just try vladtepes-666,” he muttered. “Not that it will…”
Even as he spoke, the program obediently flashed on, revealing a list of Draculacare enrollees, to his stunned surprise. If tears of joy had been able to fall down his thin dark face and into his curling black moustache, they would certainly have done so.
“Ellen!” he whispered. “We have done it! We have saved Draculacare!”
“And now you are truly my Sire!” she exclaimed. He responded by lifting her into his arms and carrying her to his bed. As he eagerly pulled her filmy white gown over her head, she responded by fumbling for his trouser buttons. But he pushed her hands aside, since he was, after all, the Sire.
He was a vampire, too, as he remembered. Even if he no longer drank her blood, he could use his mouth in other ways…the ones he had thought about, when he did not yet have a Sire’s rights to do what he pleased with his Bride.
Since he was her Sire at last, she did not even think of resisting while he ran his tongue around her nipples, leaving her writhing with desire…and then drew it all the way down her belly to her private parts. Soon she was moaning, gasping and crying out with pleasure, as he circled his tongue inside her.
When they reached the height of ecstasy, she lay panting with delight in his arms. At last, however, she managed to whisper…”You are my Sire forever, and I will always try to please you the same way you pleased me!”
Tugging his trousers to his knees, she took his organ into his mouth and sucked just as hard and as long as though she had been…well…sucking his blood. His cry of delight was almost as violent as her own had been.
“If only the whole world knew as much pleasure as we just did,” she sighed into his ear. “Then everyone would take part in Draculacare.”
“And thanks to you, they might very well do it!” he retorted happily.
* * * *
Once the computers were up and running again, the Sunset Shutdown was over. That gave many of their fellow Undead Americans almost as much pleasure as Dracula and Ellen had felt…if not always the same kind.
For Crina, the Leading Undead Realtor, the height of joy was reached when she saw listings flooding in, from vampires who had hesitated to sell their property when they knew they might have to hide there at any moment from the pitchfork-waving mob.
At the same time, she also found plenty of buyers, who rushed to join the Grateful Undead when Draculacare came roaring back to life. That meant looking for dwellings with large dark basements and walls without built-in mirrors, so Crina was quick to oblige them. Just to speed her business along, she offered the dark kiss to the un-undead as a bonus, in encouraging sales.
The results were so impressive, she wound up being chosen as Realtor of the Year and a lifetime member of the Million-Dollar Sales Club. Considering how long her lifetime was sure to last, that was quite an honor.
Her former sister-bride Simona was also cashing in, along with her movie-star spouse. Both starred together in Draculacare…the docu-drama miniseries based on the entire affair. She even got to play the organ for the background music, thus entitling her to two Emmy nominations, for both Best Actress and Best Musical Score. Tim Johnson also played himself in the movie, thus advancing from model to movie actor.
President O’Neill also benefitted, along with his undead son-in-law, George Zagorsky (D-Calif), his banshee daughter Maeve, his undead bodyguard Yvlenia, and of course the lady he always called his “be-witching bride.” Now he was boasting about them all openly, in every speech he made…and he was called on to make plenty of them, as his standing soared in the polls.
The polling showed the same results when it came to his pet project of Draculacare. Within a month, it went from “Eighty percent opposed, ten percent in favor and ten percent undecided” to the other way around.
As the pollsters pointed out, many of the favorable votes were coming from the wave of new Undead Americans, who were benefiting once again from the Eternal Care Act.
That new spirit of tolerance and understanding also embraced the werewolves, witches, zombies and other supernatural minorities. In this atmosphere, they found it easy to embrace each other…in spirit, anyway.
Privately, many vampires still looked down on zombies, while witches looked down on werewolves, but they all kept their prejudiced feelings to themselves.
As for the children of vampires, like Ellen’s son Luther, they were soon so well accepted that he was allowed to visit his famous stepsire on special occasions, like Halloween, Friday the Thirteenth, and the publication anniversary date of Twilight.
And as for the black tomcats that the First Witch had transformed into Secret Service agents…well, they were glad to be changed back again after the crisis was over. In their guise as human beings, they had gotten pretty hungry for pussy…and the real-life pussies were happy to oblige.
About the Author
This silly but sexy series started with I’m Undead and I Vote, which was inspired by bumper stickers with mottoes like “I’m Pro-Life (or Pro-Chocie) and I Vote.” It had already occurred to me that I was reading about so many vampires in sci-fi fantasy stories, there would be enough of them to elect a president…so that’s just what I had them deciding to do. Since then, the best-selling Extasy series has also featured I’m a Vampire and I Count, I’m a Vampire at War of Halloween, I’m a Vampire in the Line of Garlic and I’m a Vampire for Real.
Table of Contents
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
About the Author
Charge of Draculacare