Unmade: A Neo-Nihilist Vampire Tale

by Vocabulariast, The

  The copper-haired girl slapped the girl on the leash and then wrapped the leash around her fist bringing her closer. He could plainly see the pink handprint that grew on the leashed girl’s face. The copper-haired girl had wound most of the leash around her hand until it had become a leash covered fist that floated inches from the leashed girl’s face. The thumping beat of the music stopped. The crowd held its breath as they eyeballed the strange little tableau on the stage.

  In a shocking burst the copper-haired girl’s fingers snapped open as the music kicked in again. Her open hand reached behind the leashed girls head in a violent movement and shoved the leashed one’s head between her own spread legs. The purplish lights flashed in patterns as the music built and built to a furious passion. He felt like he was in an automated automobile manufacturing plant where all the machines had been injected with speed instead of oil. The leashed girl’s head moved in between the copper-haired girls legs in wild time with the music. People were doing one of two things: screaming at the top of their lungs or standing there rapt, as he was. He didn’t really notice these things as much as he felt them. The music drowned out any sound and he only had eyes for the girls on stage.

  The lights flashed so fast that the leashed girl’s head seemed to be glowing. The intermittent splotches of purplish light that lit upon her hair reflected back so that it looked like any second her head was going to explode.

  The music stopped and the lights changed from purple to a blaring white. The change was so sudden that the “woo’ers” in the crowd stopped making their catcalls. The copper-haired girl yanked on the leash and pulled the second girl from between her legs. His mouth dropped open at what he saw.

  The copper-haired girl stood there with her legs spread just like before, except now there were smears of red all over her privates and smeared along her inner thighs. He quickly tore his face away from the revolting sight and focused on the face of the so-black-it’s-purple-haired girl. She had blood coming out of her mouth as well as smeared all over her cut jawline and chin. It was then that the copper-haired girl spoke.

  “How do I taste, my dear?”

  The girl on the leash crawled on all fours to the front of the stage as the copper-haired girl let the leash go slack. She looked him right in the eye, because somehow he had gotten to the very front of the stage. He would give anything to be standing at the back of the room with some of the Stanks right now.

  Her body convulsed and shook as if she was having a seizure. His skin crawled because she never took her eyes off of him. Then suddenly she threw up onto the shiny black floor of Beelzebub’s. Crimson liquid splashed from the girl’s mouth onto the floor in a thick puddle of stickiness. The silence in the crowd seemed to fill the room worse than the hundred or so people that had been smoking in here. There was dead silence and then the leashed girl smiled at him. Her teeth were covered in blood and he clearly saw that the two canine teeth were pointed.

  Just as he felt he had to say something the lights turned off. The crowd, which had been silent until now, roared with applause. The “woo’ers” came out of the woodwork and the place rang with stomping feet.

  “Alright! Let’s hear it for The Fabulous Vamp Twins. C’mon, give ‘em a hand and pick your jaws up off the floor.”

  The crowd applauded even louder at the announcer’s words. They felt assured that it was ok to applaud because the announcer told them it was so.

  “One more time for Morosia and Bleak, The Fabulous Vamp Twins.”

  The crowd applauded again and then the house light came on. People moved to the bar in a flood of humanity, either to celebrate what they just saw or a get a beer that would make them forget it. All of the sudden, he needed a beer too.

  The crowd milled around waiting for the next act. The Stanks huddled in a crowd and talked in little groups. The fetish people strolled around in their provocative outfits. Somehow they seemed to have lost their exotic charm for him. The only thing he was interested in now was knocking down a few and hoping that the next performance wasn’t as disturbing. He felt nauseous every time he thought about the girl’s sick, blood-stained grimace inches from his face. He looked down and saw that the tips of his shoes were covered in a red substance. Then he looked inside of his bottle and found a little comfort.

  He had downed six bottles of comfort when it happened. The acts had been coming on stage regularly for the last fifteen minutes, none of them were as morbid or stomach churning as The Fabulous Vamp Twins, but they certainly weren’t the type of thing that put him in the mood for trapping a piece of elusive “hot pussy pie.” There was a couple in leather outfits that took turns spanking each other and pouring hot wax on sensitive spots. One woman covered herself in quick-drying liquid latex so that she looked like a naked green alien. One man came up and dangled from a rig that was hung from the ceiling and attached to hooks that pierced his flesh. The crowd applauded for each of these acts and stomped their feet and clapped for more. He just drank.

  He had just finished his sixth bottle of beer and was heading to the bar when he bumped into a woman covered in piercings and leather, nothing original there. Her drink spilled onto the pierced man that she had been talking to or offering herself to or whatever the hell she was doing. The man’s eyes lit up, filled with the look of a man who is about to prove how badass he is to a woman. The look in his eyes, the size of the man, and the upside-down nose piercing that the man sported gave the man a bull-like appearance. His head was shaved and the veins stood out on his sweat-bead spotted head.

  “Watch where the fuck you’re going!”

  He gave the man a curt “I’m sorry” before moving along, hoping that he had defused the situation. Just as he thought it was over the man grasped his shoulder from behind and spun him around.

  “I didn’t ask if you were sorry, boy! I told you to watch where the fuck you’re going.”

  He stared the man in the face and saw that “I’m-gonna-prove-myself look” and decided there wasn’t going to be a way out of this. He reached up and grabbed the man’s nose-ring and paused for a half-second as the man’s eyes crossed to look down at his nose. He laughed at the sight at the same time he wrenched the piercing free from its fleshy encasing. With his free hand he brought his empty beer bottle crashing down on the back of the doubled-over man’s head.

  The whole scene took less than a half a second, but it seemed like minutes. He watched in fascination at his own actions. He saw it all as if time had slowed just for him: the ripping of the man’s flesh as he tore the horseshoe shaped piercing from the man’s face, the look of pain and surprise as the “I’m-gonna-prove-myself look” disappeared from his eyes, the brown glass of his bottle spreading open to embrace the man’s skull, the brief half-second where everything seems ok and then the blood starts flowing.

  He dropped the remains of the bottle onto the floor as the bull-man’s head started sprouting rivers of blood. He was bracing himself for a knee to the man’s face when he was tackled from behind. Apparently, the bouncers here were quick. As he was lying on the floor struggling to get free, he locked eyes with one of The Fabulous Vamp Twins. Was it Morosia or Bleak? He didn’t really have time to find out as he was ushered out the back door of Beelzebub’s.

  Chapter 11: A Stern Talking To

  He was dragged into one of those places you see in movies, the dark alley behind the seedy joint. He was tossed between two dumpsters as the bouncers discussed what to do with him.

  “C’mon, Earl. Let’s just call the cops and let them deal with this.” A skinny bouncer in fingerless leather gloves talked to the bouncer that he had met earlier that evening.

  “I don’t think so. It’s a matter of principal, Mike. I told this man that I didn’t want any trouble and he goes and does it anyway.” The bouncer looked down at him with a sad look in his eye. “I told you if there was gonna be any trouble, we were gonna have a little talk.” He paused as if to ascertain if what he was saying was sinking in. The green flecks in his eye
s sparkled on the beer bottle-hued plane of his irises. “I ain’t no hard guy. Since we’re gonna talk, I’ll give you the first word.”

  The bouncer stood up straight, folded his arms and looked down at him like there wasn’t anything that he could say that would make a difference. He was going to get a stern talking to, one way or the other… so he said what was on his mind.

  “Do you know where I can get a piece of hot pussy pie?”

  The other bouncer, Mike, let a laugh escape from the back of his throat, a big meaty laugh that was soon quelled when Mike gave him a green-flecked look that would shut Rush Limbaugh up… and that bastard never quit talking. Earl looked down at him. The look he had in his eyes was not unlike the look that a father who loves his son would give if he found out that same son had just raped his own sister. Then Earl let loose with a steel-toed boot into his midsection.

  It hurt. Oh yeah, everything that Earl did to him hurt… but he’d felt pain before, and this was nothing compared to that. The boots kept flying and he didn’t care. His self-preservation instinct kicked in and he took every blow in the most comfortable fashion that he could. His mind retreated into the back of his head as the waffle prints rained down upon him.

  The last time he had felt pain like this his whole world had been pulled out from underneath him.

  Chapter 12: Starfish Farms of the Past

  He could hear them inside as he cleaned off the windshield. Two summer months worth of bugs clung to the front of his car. Old green splotches with the occasional wing fluttering in the slight southerly breeze. It was the southern breezes that brought the warm air and the sun with it. It was a good day to have off. He couldn’t remember the last time he had a day off where the sun actually shone.

  Their voices ricocheted off the pine trees as he struggled to remove the especially crusty remains of a bee from the windshield; a black and yellow ring of thorax clung stubbornly despite his best efforts. It might be time to use the all purpose tool of the human body, the fingernail.

  They were inside closing the windows that had been opened to let the south wind air out their tiny house. Three months worth of gloom and claustrophobia had seemed to vanish with the warm fragrant tongue of air from the south. If it was nice here; it would be even nicer at the beach.

  He didn’t much care for the beach, but that’s the way he was. He didn’t care about places; he cared about people. He could be sitting in a hot tub in hell and it wouldn’t even matter as long as his little girl and his wife were there with him. It was his wife that loved the beach. He could never quite understand it. The place was dirty, the water was cold, and who knew what kind of diseases and germs all those animals in the tide pools were carrying. You could bet your next breath that in a couple of hours, there they’d both be ankle deep in freezing germy water, poking slimy sea life and giggling like morons. But, hey, the beach was no hot tub in hell and he’d finally be able to relax with his wife and daughter the whole weekend. This is why he worked non-stop, right?

  He finished cleaning off the windshield and looked up to see his wife chasing his daughter through the house. All he could see of his daughter was the top of her blonde head as it raced through one window, disappeared, and then reappeared in the next window. He heard the unintentional/intentional laughter of a child being tickled into submission and he knew who had won this battle.

  He sat back to admire his handiwork and let the southerly breeze ruffle through his hair. Soon his wife and daughter came out of the house carrying more stuff than anyone would need for a month, let alone a week.

  “We’re only going away for a night,” he exclaimed in mock surprise. To tell the truth, he had expected more baggage than that.

  “It’s only a few things… just in case Cassie gets bored.” His wife smiled at him as his daughter ran full tilt into his legs. She would have fallen flat on her rump if he hadn’t bent down to scoop her up in time.

  “How can she get bored? All those squirmy things in the water will keep her company.” He tickled her until she made a high pitched squeal that only parents could love.

  Cassie tilted her round face up at his and pointed a finger at him. “Stop it, Daddy, or Mommy’s going to spank you.”

  “Well I wouldn’t want that, now would I?” He walked over to his wife with Cassie still in his arms. The sun beat down on their eyelashes as he gave her a kiss and felt the softness of her lips. He opened the car door with his free hand and put Cassie in her safety seat. He let his wife do the dirty work of buckling all the snaps and making sure everything was safe. When she was done, she stepped back and he closed the door and then he gave her a kiss that daddies only give mommies when their children aren’t looking.

  “You ready?”

  “I’ve been ready since winter started,” she replied and gave him one last kiss.

  “Then let’s get going.”

  They piled into the car, him after putting away the bags and her after checking to make sure the doors were locked and pausing to see if they had forgotten anything. She was good at the little details like that. He probably would have fallen apart long ago if it hadn’t been for her.

  He turned the key and started the engine. There was a faint chirping, but nothing to worry about. It was probably one of the belts, but he could get that checked on after they came back from the beach. That was one of the perks of working at a service station six days a week; they cut you some slack on the price of labor when you had to get your piece of shit car worked on.

  He backed out of his driveway to the soothing music of The Slackers, a swing ska band. Ska was exactly the type of music for a long road trip; it kept the nerves loose and prevented any sort of road rage, something he had been known for in his younger days. His wife didn’t like that side of him, so he listened to the soothing horns and the smooth vocal stylings of Vic Ruggiero.

  He made his way to Highway 30 and headed west. Highway 30 was the straightest road to get to the beach from Scappoose and he was glad as the town fell away from sight. He was even gladder when, the smell from the St. Helens mill was past.

  They meandered their way into the safety corridor, a twisted, snake-like road lined with trees. On the south side of the road, fern-covered mountains rose to the sky. On the north side the land dropped away to the Columbia River, or so he assumed. The trees obscured the view, trees with bases that couldn’t be seen. He tapped his thumbs on the steering wheel as his wife and his daughter discussed the beach.

  “So what do you want to do at the beach, Cassie?”

  “I want starfish,” she squealed with genuine delight.

  “What are you going to do with a starfish?” his wife asked.

  “I’m going to take it home and fill up the bathtub and feed it salad so it stays healthy and then it will make baby starfish and then I’m going to…”

  His daughter continued detailing her dream of creating a starfish farm as he rounded the corners of the highway. The up and down motion of the road might do his stomach in if it went on much longer. It was funny how sometimes a road you had driven countless times before would hit you in a different way every now and then.

  “Don’t you think the starfish would be happier living in the ocean,” his wife asked reasonably.

  “No,” Cassie spat back.

  “Well, why not?”

  “Because I’ll love them.”

  He listened with amusement and affection as the car rounded a corner and exploded. Another car, a red blur, blasted into the front left fender of their car driving it off the road and into the steep drop off of the north side. For a brief instant, he imagined that they would fall all the way into the Columbia River. They had no such luck as their car slammed into the 200-hundred-year thick trunk of a pine tree. The already battered car wrapped around the tree on the passenger side and he saw a shock of blonde hair pass before his eyes before everything went dark.

  Chapter 13: No Names Necessary

  The screech of Beelzebub’s back door and the crunch of
a rib brought him back from memory lane and placed him back down in the pile of slimy slop that existed between the dumpsters. Earl’s face was covered with beads of sweat. He probably would have stopped beating the man sooner if the guy had made some sort of noise. Instead, the man with the bruised nose had just laid there, moving just enough to avoid any permanent bodily damage. Earl felt slightly dirty, as if he had been up on the stage of Beelzebub’s doing one of those sick performances that all the trendy fuckers from the southeast side of the city loved so much. The only reason he stopped was that he felt the give in the man’s side as one of his ribs was broken. He stood back, waiting for a noise, a groan, anything that would let him know that the man with the bruised face was still alive.

  Mike had left a few kicks ago and when the back door opened again Earl thought it was him that was standing on the single step that led down into the putrescence of the alley.

  “This guy’s unreal. I ain’t never seen no one take a beatin’ like that.”

  “Wow, that’s great. You must feel like a real badass.”

  Earl’s head snapped up from his examination of the nearly unconscious man at hearing the sound of a woman’s voice instead of the squeaky-deep voice of Mike.

  “What the hell are you doin’ back here? Don’t you got some freaks to hang out with?”

  The woman approached Earl and he could finally see who was talking, the girl from the stage show, the one with the purple-black hair. She looked down at him with pity.

  “I think this guy’s had enough. You should go back inside, someone might be beating the shit out of a defenseless man.”