His hand snaked out and grabbed the rat, squeezing it. It's ribs crackled under the pressure, breaking and forcing the rat’s recent meal to complete the digestion process a little faster than was natural. The light in the rat’s eyes faded away as it graced him with one last glance that simply said, “I knew this was too good to be true.”
He brought the warm lump of flesh up to his mouth and sunk his teeth into the mangy fur of the deceased rat. It was definitely not like biting into an apple. Warm blood did not squirt into his mouth. All he managed to do by biting the poor thing was squish its insides a little more. He began to saw at the throat of the rat with his canine teeth, attempting to tear open the flesh and release the liquid that had ceased to pulse inside. He could feel the fleas and lice that lived in the rat’s fur dancing underneath his nose like the fizzy bubbles of a freshly poured soft drink. He sawed and sawed, attempting not to gag at the smell of ragged rat fur and the sensation of parasites dancing on his tongue. A tear finally formed, and he was rewarded with his first few droplets of blood.
The sensation wasn’t near as intense as it had been when he had tasted his own blood. This blood did not contain the rush of flavors that existed in his own. Instead he was greeted with the taste of a thousand meals composed of garbage and decaying food. He felt like he had just licked the sludge that lives at the bottom of a recently emptied dumpster. It was not a pleasant taste, but the feeling was the same. He felt invigorated. He felt energy. He felt life.
The feeling lasted briefly. The few drops of blood that he managed to slurp from the rip in the rat’s flesh faded quickly and were replaced by the grumbling of his now active stomach. He had been expecting a tiny fountain of blood that would run out when there was no more to be had, but the rat’s heart had stopped beating. The pressure that had forced the rat’s blood through its circulatory system had ceased beating a minute or two ago, locking its liquid in its muscles and organs. He squeezed the rat like a tube of stubborn toothpaste that was unwilling to give up its contents.
The rat’s body bulged like a water balloon filled to bursting, a tiny stream of red poured out of the rat’s gash and he tilted his head back to catch the syrupy stream on his tongue. The gash opened wider and the rat’s blood gushed forth, mixed with excrement and organs, onto his face. He gagged at the combination. He swished the mixture around in his mouth, sucking the liquids from the organs while trying to swallow as little of the excrement as possible. When he had gotten as much as he could from the mouthful of filth he spit it out on the sidewalk, making a filthy red-hued blob.
He was still hungry, and even though it tasted like shit, literally, he picked up the rat corpse, which was little more than just skin with a head that flopped from side to side. He turned the rat skin inside out and began to lick up the remnants of the rat’s blood.
“That’s some sick shit!”
He was interrupted from his reverie by the disgust-tinged voice of a street person that had stumbled upon his feast. He stopped licking the skin, not removing it from his lips, and realized just how depraved he must look. His nose and mouth were completely covered in blood and his shirt had a couple drops of bloody excrement and organs on it.
He froze not knowing what to do.
The street person wore a skullcap and an old military jacket. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a hand-rolled cigarette and lit it.
“Oh, well. You gotta do what you gotta do.” The street person moved to sit next to him, much to his surprise. “Don’t mind me. You keep doin’ whatchyou were doin’. It don’t bother me none.”
The street person said all this as he blew a long, wine-stained breath of cigarette smoke into his face.
He finished licking the insides of the rat and sat back content, like a suburban father after Thanksgiving dinner. The street person continued to ramble as he attempted to pull the fur from in between his canine and front teeth.
“Yep, I seen worse than that. I was in ‘Nam you know. I saw a helluva lot worse than that.” The street person took a drag from his cigarette before taking up his rambling.
“You know, I once saw a little girl running down the street with her skin hanging off of her back. We had some pretty nasty weapons. The type of shit you see in a bad science fiction movie.”
Another pause, another drag.
“I ate a rat once. I didn’t eat it raw like that, but I ate one. It wasn’t too bad. I wouldn’t want to live off the damn things, but it’ll do in a pinch. Hell, it was better than the shit ole Uncle Sam tried to call food.”
The street person seemed to get lost in his memories for a second before he came back. He noticed the pile of uneaten and eaten food that sat on his right side.
“Say whatchyou got over there?”
He cleared his throat before he answered; the rat’s blood had created a sticky coating of phlegm in the back of his throat. “That’s just some shit I was trying to eat earlier. That thing on top is a burrito that I ate and the thing on bottom is a Mexican pizza.”
The street person nudged him in the ribs and pointed at the food, “You don’t mind, do ya?”
“No. Go for it.” He reached over and grabbed the Mexican pizza by its cardboard box, lifting it at an angle so that the rat-nibbled, once-a-burrito slid off of it. He then handed it to the street person.
The street person opened the lid of the Mexican pizza. He looked like a jewel thief opening a suitcase full of diamonds. He didn’t seem to mind the sludge that was resting on top of the cardboard box. He reached inside and grabbed a slice.
He watched the street person in mild amusement as he took his first bite. His eyes rolled into the back of his head and he kicked his feet like he was a boy with an ice cream cone on a late summer’s afternoon.
“Mmmmmmmmmm, mmmmmmm, that is delicious. Damn boy, what the hell are you munchin’ on vermin for, if you got a slice of heaven like this sittin’ next to you?”
He thought for a second. He didn’t know how to answer the person without seeming crazy. He supposed it didn’t really matter. If the old man didn’t think he was nuts for eating a raw rat in the first place, he doubted he could say much to change his mind on the matter.
“I keep getting sick every time I try to eat something. I've tried and tried, but I just keep throwing up. At least until tonight, you know.” He gestured at the shredded rat corpse with his hand.
The street person finished chewing, grabbed another slice and popped it into his mouth. “That is a mystery, my boy. That is a mystery.”
“The weird thing is I didn’t even eat the rat. I just wanted its blood.”
The street person kept chewing his food and thinking and then a laugh bubbled up from inside him, the type of laugh that starts out low and builds to a cackle.
“What? What’s so funny?” He had to wait for the old man’s laughter to die away before he could get an answer, and even then he seemed ready to burst out into another fit at any moment.
“Did you ever think that…,” he paused to choke back a laugh and then found enough composure to finish his sentence. “Did you ever think that maybe you’re a vampire?”
The street person burst into another violent fit of laughter. He held onto his sides and rocked back and forth as if in pain or as if he was trying to keep his insides from bursting out of his skin.
He cocked his head to the side enjoying the sound of the man’s laughter in his ears and mulling over his last statement. The bite, the blood, it all made perfect sense… if you were crazy.
“C’mon man, there’s no such thing as vampires.”
The street person’s laughter died down and the joviality seemed to evaporate from his face. He seemed to think for a second and then decided something in his head.
“There’s lots of things you don’t know boy, lots of things.”
“Vampires? If vampires were real, I think we’d know about it.”
“Maybe you don’t know, and maybe I do.” The old man wiped his mouth as if to clear it for speak
ing. There was a particularly persistent peace of refried beans clinging to the stubble at the corner of his mouth. “I’m going to tell you a story, and you can simply take it for a story, or you can make whatever you want out of it. Hell, you can shove it up your ass for all I care.”
The old man had his attention, even if he was slightly skeptical.
“I told you how I was in the ‘Nam, right?”
“Uh-huh, go on.”
“Don’t fuckin’ rush me, ya bastard. Just cuz you gave me some of your food don’t mean you can treat me like some worthless bum. I may be a worthless bum, but that don’t mean you can treat me like one.”
“I’m sorry… I wasn’t…”
“Just shut the hell up, will ya? Let me tell it. You listen, I speak. That’s how it works.” The agitated old man pulled a cigarette out of his pocket and lit it. He took a long drag and blew it out, and with that puff he found the courage to tell his story.
Chapter 19: Story Time
“We were a hardcore group. Most of us came in together and we stayed together. Maybe we were lucky or unlucky, who’s to say? We’d seen it all, like I was tellin’ you before. We seen heads get blowed up. We seen babies get their heads smashed in. We’d seen soldiers strung up like they were deer, their guts sitting in a little pile at their fingertips. But there was one thing none of us had ever seen before, the creepiest shit I ever seen in my life.”
“We were out doing some recon. Your typical army bullshit. ‘We don’t know where they are, so you guys cover this area. Shoot anything that looks suspicious.’ We were out walking, looking, seein’ what ole Charlie’s up to, when we come upon this little village.”
“It wasn’t nothin’ special, just a lil’ Podunk village. The villagers grew rice, they lived in huts, they fucked and made babies. That’s it. Anyways, we walk into this village in the middle of the damn day. We must have done this shit 100 times before, but this time it was different.”
“You see, normally, when you walk into one of these villages, there’s a lot of hustle and bustle. In a small village like the one we were in, if you ain’t workin’ then you’re gonna be starvin’. Usually, when you walk into a village, you’ll see some motherfuckers out in a rice paddie. They got some oxen, they’re drivin ‘em around and they don’t stop for shit. You got some women walkin’ around with baskets full of shit on their heads and you got some old people sittin’ in the middle of the village watchin’ all the babies. They don’t give a fuck what you do as long as you ain’t comin’ in and shootin’ their ass. Which we didn’t. My outfit was a good outfit, a smart outfit. No use makin’ enemies when you got plenty hidin’ in the bushes, ya know what I mean?”
“Anyways, like I said, this village was different. We come walkin’ in, in the middle of the day, and there ain’t shit goin’ on. There ain’t even smoke from old fires. Everything looks tip top, except there ain’t no fuckin’ people. So we spread out; do a search of the village.”
“We weren’t freaked out, not just yet anyway. We seen dead villages before, villages where everyone had been wiped out, but this one wasn’t like those. There was no damage. There weren’t any bullet holes in anything. There wasn’t no smell of rot so you knew that whatever had gone down had gone down recently soon. There weren’t any signs of scuffle except for some overturned baskets and shit.”
“We start searching and pokin’ around and still nothing. No bodies, no corpses, no freshly dug graves. Everything was left like they just disappeared and were plannin’ on comin’ back later. Me and the crew started to get antsy. They start gettin’ tense. Everyone’s got this feelin’ like somethin’ ain’t right. We’re all ready to move on when one of the boys finds a path and some tracks.”
“These aren’t your normal footprints. For sure there’s some footprints but most of the tracks are drag marks. Someone that ain’t been in the shit might mistake the path for a bike trail, lots of ruts and shit. But I seen enough to know that something was dragged and the only thing that makes drag marks like that are human bodies.”
“People start pissing and groaning. By now pretty much everyone’s spooked and we don’t even want to go up that trail. But Sarge, man, he’s all like, ‘Hey, people. We’re not here for a fuckin’ vacation. We here to protect these people and kill anything that wants to kill them.’ Sarge was a real asshole. Had red hair too. I hate red hair."
“None of us are buyin’ his shit, but, like I said, we’d been lucky and he ain’t never steered us in no bad direction. So we strap our shit down, make sure we’re locked and loaded and we make our way up the trail, quiet like fuckin’ death himself, and that’s good too, cuz the jungle was even quieter. Let me tell you boy, there ain’t no sign in the world that tells you you’re in the wrong fuckin’ place like a jungle that’s dead quiet.”
“So there we are creep, creep, creepin’ and I’m ready to just fuckin’ turn around and go wait in the village when we come upon a clearing. That’s where we found all of the villagers. They’re all strung up from the trees over this hole that’s been dug in the ground. For a second I relax. You wouldn’t think that the sight of a forty or fifty dead villagers would make a man relax, but I did. Then I see some movement, in the hole, just the tops of a couple of heads and some splashing.”
“By now we had pretty much surrounded the clearing. We all close on the hole, silently, creeping. The people in the hole don’t notice us and I’m the first one there, and there they are, the only two living people we seen besides ourselves and they’re fucking. A guy and a girl sitting in a pool of villagers' blood, just fucking their brains out. I almost threw up right there. Some motherfuckers did, but not me. I know better than to take my eyes off the type of people that would fuck in a pool of people’s blood.”
“The two fuckers look right up at me and smile. That’s it man. The two sick fucks just look up, in mid-fuck and smile. By now, we got the whole place surrounded. Sarge makes the Mormon boy jump in the hole and pull the fuckers apart. I’m sittin’ there watchin’ the boy struggle with these two savages in the hole and I swear I seen them maniacs both start gulping up mouthfuls of blood. The Mormon boy wasn’t the strongest boy, and he was having some trouble, so Sarge tells me to get in and help him out."
"So I climb in and we still can’t drag the fuckers out of that pit. It takes two more of us to pull the bastards out of the hole and the whole time the guy and the girl are trying to scoop handfuls of blood into their mouths. We all figure they’re crazy so Sarge has us bring ‘em back into the village because everyone has had enough of that clearing. So we march the two bastards, naked and covered in blood, back into the village, right into the middle of it. We throw them down in the dirt and Sarge tells the interpreter to ask them what happened."
"The whole time the girl is smiling at me, licking blood off of her face and her fingers. The interpreters trying to get information out of the two but they’re not even paying attention. They’re just smiling and licking. Finally, the boy looks at the interpreter and says something. You know what that bastard said?”
He pauses for a minute thinking that it was a rhetorical question, and then he sees that the old man is waiting for an answer. It’s as if the old man would end his story right there if he didn’t give him an answer. For a second, he’s not even sure if he wants to know the answer to the question. He’s not sure whether the old Vietnam veteran sitting next to him isn’t just another crazy street bum whose brains have been stirred a little too much.
He finds himself asking, “What did he say?” He commits himself to the veteran’s story, whether it’s sane or insane.
“Well, the interpreter pauses for a bit, and then makes sure he understood what the guy was saying. He looks at me, behind those army-issued eyeglasses, and then he turns to the Sarge. He licks his lips before he says anything and then he says, ‘Delicious.’”
“Delicious?” he found himself parroting in disbelief.
“Yeah, delicious. Can you believe that shit?” The old ve
teran takes another cigarette from his magic, never-ending pocket of hand-rolled cigarettes and lights it before he continues.
“Sarge pulls me aside to talk to me. He wants to know what we should do. I tell him, ‘There ain’t nothin’ to do Sarge.’ He looks me in the eye and says, ‘You’re right about that.’ We both knew how it was going to go down. There wasn’t no use saying it. Saying the words out loud made it bad. Saying the words out loud made it real.”
“Me and Sarge walk back to the clearing where those two bastards are smiling up at us. We un-sling our rifles, and we put two rounds through their smiling faces.”
The old man holds his fingers out like an imaginary gun. “Blam! Blam!” After the second blam he holds his fingers up to his lips and blows away imaginary smoke. “It wasn’t a happy time. We didn’t feel good about it. There was a whole village of bloodless dead people hanging from trees, but that still didn’t make us feel any better. The sick shit was that those two people still had smiles on their faces when they were dead. The back of their skulls were sprayed all over the dirt of that village and they were smiling up at us like they were simply a young couple posing for a photo.”
The old man paused as if his story was over. He flicked his cigarette halfway across the street and stared off into the darkness.
“That doesn’t mean they were vampires. Shit, there’s lots of sick fucks out there, but that doesn’t make them vampires.”
The old man gave him a look, the type of look that wise old men find themselves giving to young men who think they got it all figured out. “I ain’t done yet. Did I say I was done?”
“No.”
“Then keep your trap shut. I got to organize my thoughts. Did you ever try tellin’ a story that’s thirty-five years old?” He shook his head. Hell, he wasn’t even thirty yet. “Well, alright then. You just remember that the next time you feel like you’re gonna tell me something I already know.”
Unmade: A Neo-Nihilist Vampire Tale Page 7