Unmade: A Neo-Nihilist Vampire Tale

by Vocabulariast, The

  “Lllllluuuuuuccccciiinnnnnnddddddaaaaaa, I need another down here.”

  She gave him a look, and then glanced across the bar at one of the bouncers. They passed some sort of signal that he couldn’t see, and the bouncer disappeared out of the front door, most likely to notify Earl that there was some sort of problem. She walked to the refrigerator and opened it, snaking out another beer. She moved slowly, stalling for time.

  He felt the presence of someone behind him, a hot body radiating heat, and he knew that he was now onstage. A few eyes had turned in his direction from down the bar, and the man next to him must have found an empty seat because he grabbed his drink and disappeared from his side.

  Lucinda finally made her way to his end of the bar and she placed the beer in front of him, unopened. “That’ll be two-fifty.”

  He held the money in one hand close to his body, as he opened the beer with the other. He put it up to his lips and drank from it. Lucinda reached for the money, leaning across the counter. As her hand touched the money, he let go and grabbed a handful of Lucinda’s left breast. He even managed to get a squeeze off before he was wrestled off of the stool that he had been sitting on. He kept chugging his beer as he was dragged stiff as a board out the back door.

  He could hear Lucinda yelling, “Kick that old fucker’s ass, Earl!”

  Chapter 36: Revenge

  He was tossed in between two dumpsters in a back alley, which had somehow managed to keep a thin layer of slime in the summer heat. Earl loomed up above him, a towering giant from his vantage point.

  “I’m sorry to have to do this old-timer, but no one messes with Lucinda and gets away with it.” Earl reared his foot back and the Old Soldier curled himself up into a little ball, awaiting the force of the steel-toed kick that he knew was coming.

  He heard the sound of ginger footsteps on dry pavement, and when he opened his, eyes he laughed. Both of Earl’s feet were now on the ground, there would be no kick. A silver spike was sticking out of Earl’s neck. It had been placed precisely where he had told his friend to put it, in the jugular vein. Unfortunately, he had forgotten to tell his friend to not leave the knife sitting in Earl’s throat. The knife blocked the flow of blood, and even though Earl was most certainly a dead man, he would still have a few minutes to alert people to his situation if they didn’t act fast.

  He needn’t have worried. As soon as Earl realized that he was in pain and that the pain was coming from his neck, he reached up and pulled the knife from his neck. A tiny squirt of blood shot out of Earl’s neck, the blood had definitely started to flow. Earl turned around, his body still filled with enough blood to function. He saw the man behind him. He recognized the face, but it seemed to be on a completely different body. The face that he saw shouldn’t be attached to the stick of a man that now stood before him. Maybe this stick man was the twin of the other man. He definitely didn’t have enough meat for it to be the same guy.

  As the stick man looked at Earl, waiting for him to react, he finally realized that he was bleeding profusely from the neck and that he had the offending weapon in his hand. He pulled his arm back to gather strength to plunge the knife into the stick man, but before he could do so the Old Soldier had thrown his legs between the larger legs of Earl, twisting and bringing him to his knees.

  Blood still pumped from Earl’s neck, as he looked from side to side, trying to figure out exactly what was going on. The Old Soldier stood up and shoved the kneeling Earl onto his face. The arm that held the knife flailed out to the side, and his friend came along and stomped on the hand. The bones crunched underneath his foot, and even though the knife was technically still held by Earl, there was no real control. He leaned down and took the knife and tossed it into the alley where it could do no more damage.

  The Old Soldier became frustrated with the nonchalance of his friend. Earl still had more than enough strength to toss him off of his back. They needed to end this quickly and quietly. “Drink ‘em! Hurry up and drink ‘em!”

  His friend dropped to his knees and placed his mouth over the slowing jet of blood that issued forth from Earl’s severed jugular. He had to chase the open wound around with his mouth as the Old Solider began to pound Earl’s head on the dirty pavement.

  The blood covered his throat quickly and he swallowed as fast as he could. He was right, the flavor of Earl was far superior to anything that he had ever tasted in his life. His eyes rolled into the back of his head, and the images and scenes of food and flavor took over, transporting him from the slimy back alley and into the memories of Earl. He tasted things that he had never tasted before, things that were so delicious that he almost wished he could eat normal food again. He drank and drank and still the blood came. He could hear the dull smack off Earl’s face on pavement from somewhere very far off. He tasted everything that Earl had ever tasted: the breast milk fresh from the tit of Earl's mom, birthday cakes, hot dogs, sausages, the pussies of Earl’s former lovers, and even one mouthful of cum. It all went down his throat and into his mind.

  He didn’t know how long he drank Earl’s blood and he never discussed it with the Old Soldier, but he definitely thought that it wasn’t long enough. He wasn’t stopped by anyone. The Old Soldier didn’t make him stop drinking. No one walked through the back door to see what type of beating Earl was putting on the old pervert. His body simply couldn’t take anymore.

  The tastes and images slowed to a crawl like the spinning reels of a slot machine, and then they stopped altogether. His stomach rebelled, and he could feel Earl’s blood sloshing around inside. He rolled to his side, filled like a tick. He felt as if he was going to pop and then he stood. His stomach cramped and contracted and a red flood flew up the back of his throat and out through his mouth and nasal passage. The blood splashed upon the slimy pavement and he fell to his knees.

  The pain was gone. He felt good. The old man tore a chunk of Earl’s white T-shirt off and tossed it to him.

  “Wipe your face, boy. We got to get gone.” The Old Soldier walked to the end of the alley and picked up the bloody knife. He wiped it on the back of Earl’s vest that was now stained at the top with blood. Blood still dribbled from the wound in Earl’s neck and his eyes were open. His mouth opened like he was trying to say something. It looked as if he was having a silent conversation with the alley pavement.

  The Old Soldier reached into his jacket and pulled out one of his beauties, not the kind that he smoked, but the kind that you used to kill vampires. He tossed the square-handled stake, that until recently was just a piece of two-by-four, over to his friend who was just now getting off of his knees. He caught it in midair and looked down at Earl. The Old Soldier flipped Earl onto his back and his friend with the stake in his hand gave him a good kick in the ribs.

  “Go on. Stab ‘em. He might be a vampire. We don’t want to come back here next week and find him standing at the door.”

  “Where’s the heart at?”

  The Old Soldier pointed at the middle of Earl’s chest. “It’s right here.”

  “In the middle? That doesn’t seem right.”

  “Well it is.”

  “But when they do the national anthem we put our hands over our heart and that’s on the left side… or is it the right.”

  “That’s all bullshit. You put your hand over your lung when they sing the national anthem.”

  “Why?”

  “How the hell should I know? Just stab the fucker already.”

  He dropped to his knees to get better leverage, then he brought his hand down. He didn’t put enough energy into his strike and the stake glanced off of Earl’s sternum. He raised his hand to do it again.

  “Put some muscle behind it. Use that vampire strength.”

  He brought his arm down, putting all of his weight behind the strike and the stake cracked Earl’s breastbone penetrating a little bit into the tough muscle of the heart.

  “I think it’s in there.”

  The Old Soldier thought for a second and then
said, “You better do it again. Get it all the way in this time.”

  He raised his arm for a third strike and just as he was about to pounce the Old Soldier asked, “You got a good grip? You got to have a good grip”

  “Yeah, I got a good grip. Shut up.”

  He raised his arm again and paused just for a second to make sure that the Old Soldier didn’t have any more helpful hints. The Old Soldier said nothing and he brought his arm down. He felt the thick fibrous muscle of the heart split at the now dull tip of the stake and sink in to the point where the stake ceased to be sharpened and resumed the rectangular shape of a two by four. Earl had long been dead and his body did not burst into flames, or explode or anything else. He just laid there as the green flecks faded in his eyes.

  They grabbed their things and they left. The old man got drunk on some brew that he had stolen along the way. He watched and waited at the window, and when the sky started to lighten, he crawled into his coffin and slept the day away.

  Chapter 36: Regrets

  He wondered how long he had been dead for. How long had he not been alive? Technically his life had ended when he had slept with the dark angel from Beelzebub’s, but he thought that his life had ended before that. His life had ended when his wife and daughter had died, when the twisted metal of the car had slammed into a tree after being run off the road by a drunk driver; that’s when his life had ended.

  He was dead. What did that mean? He was still walking, occasionally talking, and now he was killing people or vampires or whatever the hell you wanted to call them. Would he pay for these actions in the afterlife, or was a man free from sin the moment they ceased being alive? If he was dead, did anything he did get entered on the tally sheet of life, one slain bouncer, one negative mark? Could he smoke, drink, and fuck all day and not have any negative repercussions? He supposed he couldn’t drink, not alcohol anyway.

  He felt like a man freed from all responsibility. He didn’t have to do a thing. He could sit in his coffin and rot and it wouldn’t matter. He was already dead. He could go out and burn down a forest and it wouldn’t matter. He could break into a pre-school and slaughter everyone there, and it wouldn’t matter. He was dead. He couldn’t really do anything. Maybe he didn’t even want to do anything.

  The darkness of the coffin coalesced into a gray haze where his thoughts were composed into a deadly list of justifications. Somewhere in the back of his head, there was a doubt, a growing doubt, about the justness of his current course of action, and his mind struggled to keep those thoughts in the back.

  He was dead, a condition that he had sought for quite a while, and yet he felt cheated. He felt wronged; wronged by the people that had taken his family, wronged by the woman that had taken his life and left him an empty shell, wronged by the world itself.

  He smiled at the irony of finding purpose after dying. He marveled at the absurdity of it all. A man who courts death, finds it and realizes that he finally has a purpose. He was going to kill them, kill them all, so that they couldn’t cheat anyone else of death, and if he died a second time… well, then he won either way.

  His mind made up and all objections shoved into the overstuffed closet of his mind, he lifted the coffin door sensing the subtle change in temperature that marked the shift from day to dusk. He stood up and breathed a deep breath of the apartment’s atmosphere. It refreshed his nostrils wiping away the residual reek of his coffin, which smelled like a car that had been vomited in and left in the sun for a day. The air was good and he was ready for more.

  The Old Soldier still laid on the floor where he had left him, curled up in a pile of beer cans and crushed out cigarette butts. He smelled like a human match. His face was red, still blotchy with alcohol. His hands were dark mitts of wrinkles and dirt that ended in stubby little fingers, adorned with thin slivers of dirty fingernails. A string of drool was currently slugging its way from his babbling lips and to the increasingly dirty carpet. He muttered the name Lucinda before reverting to his silent, but deep, breathing.

  He let the Old Soldier sleep a little longer before kicking him awake.

  Chapter 37: Stakeout

  The next few nights were for information gathering. The Old Soldier laid low in the apartment as he went about becoming a regular at Beelzebub’s. He was slow to fit in, especially because he couldn’t drink the alcohol without getting sick. The smell alone was enough to make his throat contract and his insides bubble. He would nurse the drink for a few minutes and then take it to the bathroom, where he would discreetly dump it down the toilet.

  He eyed the patrons of Beelzebub’s as inconspicuously as possible. The first night, there had been a few cops wandering around talking about the incident the night before. Most of the regulars, and he spotted them immediately, were shaken up, but not shaken up enough to avoid their favorite watering hole for a night. The cops gave him the once over, but after a few perfunctory questions, they left him alone. He supposed he didn’t much look like the sixty-year-old bum that the sketch artist had drawn. He would have to remember to tell the Old Soldier to ditch the army jacket and get himself a shave.

  The next night wasn’t any more exciting. There weren’t many bizarre characters in the bar. The majority of the place’s population seemed to be composed of Stanks and business people that liked to slum it a little bit. The Stanks huddled over their pints of microbrew, peering into their futures, only looking up every now and then to caress the bartender with their eyes. The business men stood around like roosters at the hen house. They didn’t drink like normal people; they had stances. One of the regular businessmen stood around with his right foot balanced on the brass pole that ran down the bottom of the bar as he stood perpendicular to it. His right hand steadied him in his precarious position as his left tipped his glass into his throat. He would eye the inside of the bar deliberately, searching but never finding what he was looking for. The other businessmen seemed to have stances and poses just as ridiculous. They looked like models that he had seen on TV, models who’s every glance and gesture reeked of nonchalance, but still left behind a slimy trail of emptiness and counterfeit leisure.

  The bartender was just as the Old Soldier had described her. Even through the sadness and pain of the first few nights, he could tell that she was trying to do her best for her customers and that the Stanks and businessmen that clung to the bar genuinely appreciated her. Her eyes were ringed by dark circles and filled with red veins the first couple of nights, so he didn’t press too hard in forcing himself into the fold as a regular.

  No one really talked about what had happened to Earl the bouncer. Everyone knew. There was no way you couldn’t notice skinny Mike standing watch at the front door, looking out of place in the fond remembrance of Earl’s bulk.

  He just laid low and listened to the banter of the regulars. There was nothing new there. No tantalizing vampire info, just the typical glut of barroom complaints and laments, people complaining about jobs, women, men, the toilet being clogged, Mexicans, the President… basically anything that couldn’t be helped.

  Except for the bartender, no one really approached him or said a word to him, which was good. He didn’t want too many friends in a place like this, especially not with what he was planning to do to some of the lucky frequenters of the establishment.

  He finally caught a break on the third night when a familiar face wandered into the bar.

  Chapter 38: Slip Your Feet Into Your Pimp Shoes

  She was there, not the one with the green-flecked, brown eyes, but the one with the copper hair. His dark angel’s friend from the stage show wandered in looking just a little different than she had the one night he had seen her. She was no longer dressed like a whore in a fetish porno. Now she was dressed like a bohemian Skank with a dark streak. She wore a black skirt that came all the way down to her shins, a black tank top, and a knit black shawl that hung over her shoulders but still showed her pale skin through the openings in the material. Her copper hair hung loose and stopped just a
bove her shoulders. Her face was almost white, not the shiny healthy white, but the pale white of caked on make-up. Her eyes were surrounded by black make-up that ran at the corner of her eyes as if she had been crying for some time. She looked like she was going to a funeral.

  He could see a myriad of silver rings adorning her fingers as she tapped them on the bar. Lucinda, the bartender made her way and they greeted each other with familiar smiles and small talk that was designed to skirt around the open wound of recent happenings.

  She ordered something, he didn’t care what, but she sipped it slow and that was to his liking. He needed some time to think about his priorities and his approach, and the longer she nursed her drink, the more time he would have.

  He didn’t want to just go up to her in the bar and start talking to her. He needed more than just simple conversation. He needed information, an “in” to start the game. He also needed to get her away from Beelzebub’s. It would do no good to be seen leaving with her. He finally figured out what he needed to do, and he made his move as she finished her first drink.

  He moved to her side and stood in that awkward half pose that people adopt when the bar is too crowded and you have to turn sideways just to keep your hand on the bar and so that the bartender will notice you. He wanted to be close to her. He needed to make everything seem like a chance encounter.

  He stood next to her waiting for Lucinda to take notice of him and take his next drink order. The drink he had ordered earlier now stood neglected and sweating at the opposite end of the bar.

  He spoke first, breaking the ice and hoping to not be shot down outright. This was all still new to him. “Hi. What are you drinking?”

  She glared at him with the red rims of the tired or sad. “What does it matter?”

  He smiled as he felt his imaginary feet slip into his imaginary pimp shoes; he felt the joy of the game wash over his body and mind. He was now engaged in the tinkering, tottering game of barrier breaking; the practice of stripping down a woman’s guards until they are ready to give you the keys to their car, or at least their bedroom. While frequently, the game didn’t go as well as all of that, you could usually get a phone number at least and this is what he was after.