Her slap-addled brain tried to understand why he was asking her the question. Why did he want to know about her friend? Her eyes darted between him and the Old Soldier and she finally figured out the answer. The old man with his knife, the meeting at Beelzebub’s, it all made sense.
“You killed Earl!” The look on their faces was all the answer that she needed. “You’re the motherfuckers that killed Earl!” She struggled against his hold, attempting to break free.
He brought his hand across her face again. The struggling did not stop. The Old Soldier moved in for a little support and placed the blade of the knife across her pasty white throat. “Tell us what we want to know, bitch.” He spoke in a cool voice laced with threat.
She kept her head still and only her eyes moved in his direction. Her jaw set and a wad of dry spittle erupted from her lips, landing on the Old Soldier’s face. “I’m not going to tell you shit.”
The Old Soldier’s head drooped and he walked smoothly to her side, drawing a thin red line across her throat with the blade of the knife. Blood trickled at a slow but unstoppable pace from the wound that he had created. The Old Soldier whispered in his ear before leaning on the rail that overlooked the river. “Do your business.”
He placed his lips across the copper haired girl’s throat. The flavors sprung to his mind immediately along with a tinge of fear and sadness. She made coughing noises as he slurped on her throat, wiggling his tongue in between the tight lips of the cut. She did not die as quickly as Earl. Her struggles were pretty fierce, no match for his strength, but pretty fierce nonetheless. The slow pace of his feeding was actually pretty enjoyable, the flavors came at a rate that was less hectic and intense and he still had his wits about him, when her heart stopped. Her eyes glazed over and he ripped open her shirt. He took one of his newly whittled stakes and drove it through her heart, hitting home on the first try. He gave her one final kiss through tear-stained eyes and then the Old Soldier tipped her legs up over the railing and dropped her into the Columbia. Her copper hair fanned out in the filthy river water like a lily pad. Soon, the current had stripped her away from the side of the river and out until the middle, where she looked like nothing more than a log.
Chapter 41: Is It Right?
They stumbled back from the waterfront like two drunks. His eyes leaked tears uncontrollably, and truth be told, he didn’t want to control them. The Old Soldier walked at his side, silent but thrumming with the adrenaline of the slayer. His steps wobbled with barely controlled excitement, just as his friend’s slogged with pointless direction. They made the fifteen block trek to the apartment in timeless time, the scenery rushing by as if on a movie screen.
When they got inside, they assumed their regular positions, the Old Soldier squatted on the floor with a beauty in hand. He flipped up the lid of his coffin and laid inside on the prickly slivers of wood.
The Old Soldier puffed silently on his cigarette as the thoughts flowed in his friend’s mind. He didn’t entirely like what he was seeing. The boy’s reaction was far different than what it had been for Earl. Sure, he wasn’t too keen on killing, and that was good, but if he wanted to make everything alright, he was going to have to nut up pretty soon. There was no time for tears, no time for doubts. That time was over. Now all that was left was the killing.
“You alright, kid?”
The coffin was silent and he heard the tobacco in his cigarette crackle as he took another puff off of his beauty. “Kid?”
“Yeah, I’m alright,” the kid's voice sprouted from the box, nasally and coated in snot.
“If you’re alright, why the hell are you sitting in that coffin, sniveling like a five-year-old girl that’s just been told she can’t have a pony?” It wasn’t the smoothest way to put it, but smooth was for the others. Smooth was for people that still had tomorrows in front of them, not the majority behind them.
“Do you think we’re doing the right thing? I mean, the books say ‘Be prepared for anything.’ They don’t say, ‘Be prepared for them to look, act and feel just like humans.’ Do you know what I mean?”
“The right thing? That’s a pretty relative thing, don’t you think? Is it right to kill people? If you went out and asked Joe Schmoe, he’s most likely gonna say that any killing is wrong. Ask someone from a concentration camp and they’ll tell you that killing is wrong too. They’ve seen it. They’ve felt it. But if you ask them what they would do if they were standing next to Hitler before the war and they had a gun in their hands… well, you can fill in the blank yourself.” He took another puff off of his cigarette before he spoke again, “The fact is, these people are killing people. These people killed you. They took your death away from you. You couldn’t die if you wanted to die. There’s no ‘natural causes’ for your ass anymore. You’re gonna die by the stake or nothing. Is it right to kill the people that killed you?” He paused for a second before answering his own question. “If killin’ your killers ain’t right, then I don’t know what is.”
There was no noise or movement from the coffin, and then the kid's hand reached out pulling the coffin lid tight and shrouding the interior in darkness.
Chapter 42: The Glasshouse
The Glasshouse was a dive club on the east side of Portland. It was located just on the other side of the train tracks that ran next to the river. From the outside, it was nondescript. There was a large square parking lot in front of the building. In order to get inside, you had to walk up a long ramp that sloped upward until it met the front door of a plain white warehouse. The inside of the warehouse was outfitted in gaudy wares; pictures of carnival freaks lined the walls and violent murals were painted in all of the blank spaces. There was one of a pale-faced man with slicked-back hair that particularly interested him.
The man’s face hung over the bared neck of a scantily clad woman, its pointed teeth dripping blood. It was the first sign that maybe he was on the right track.
Certainly, the clientele of the Glasshouse were a little more what he was looking for than the people that frequented Beelzebub’s. People dressed in black wandered from place to place. Many of them wore a thick layer of white makeup to make their faces pale. There were all colors of people in the bar and they wandered to and fro socializing and engaging in fake bouts of laughter.
He stood against the wall nursing his drink. The bar was busy enough so that the presence of a one-drink carrying man with a staring problem wouldn’t be noticed. Occasionally, he would look to his right and see the looming head of Dracula smiling out at the crowd from the flat surface of the wall. He wondered if there really was a Dracula? Was he still alive, spreading his disease like a Jehova’s witness, unwanted and unsolicited?
A man of gigantic size walked past him. His skin was paler than the others and he had a tribal tattoo covering half of his face. He smiled at someone across the room, exposing pointed teeth similar to the teeth that Dracula had in the painting at his side. He sized him up mentally and figured that he would probably be a little harder to kill than most of the other people in the room. This was the first time he was going to be going up against a male vampire, and he wanted to kill one of the men that didn’t look like they could kick his ass. He was done with killing women for a while. He had told the Old Soldier as much as they made the hike across the city. The Old Soldier tried to convince him that the things they were killing were neither women nor men, but animals, a different species altogether. He said, “You’re not killing a vagina or a penis, you’re killing some blood-sucking, murderous freaks who are intent on killing innocent people, or at the very least, making those people’s lives a living nightmare.”
The Old Soldier’s analysis made a sort of bizarre sense, but he still didn’t have it in him. Maybe in a few nights he could do the job, but not tonight. Tonight a man would die. He wondered if sucking blood from a man was considered gay. It didn’t really matter he supposed. If he was a blood-sucking freak like the Old Soldier had inadvertently implied, he supposed there were certain things th
at didn’t apply to him anymore. Being gay was probably one of them. He wasn’t gay, he didn’t think, and if he felt like having sex it would most definitely be with a woman, a woman like the one he had killed last night, or as the Old Soldier would have said “exterminated.”
He refocused his mind, opening, his eyes, refining his perception and scanning for a likely mark/vampire. He was amazed at the somberness of the crowd in the club. It was full of almost exclusively Goths as they liked to call themselves. They sat or stood in groups of four or five, talking seriously and almost never smiling. When they did laugh, it was a hollow sound that carried a little too far to be genuine, the exaggerated tossing back of their heads as they laughed didn’t help the picture any.
He spied one group of people engaged in the aforementioned lifeless banter. They huddled in a circle, sipping from their drinks occasionally. He couldn’t hear what they were saying; the low voices of the group were drowned out by the semi-loud industrial music that filled the place. He wondered why they would even sit there hanging out with each other if they weren’t having a good time. He thought that going to the bar to be sad should be a solitary thing. People can handle seeing a lone sad man, they don’t really like to see groups of sad people; it makes them feel uncomfortable and self-conscious of their own happiness. Then again, that didn’t seem to be a problem. There were very few riotous personalities here. They looked like an army waiting for battle, but with nothing to fight for. Their uniforms were dark clothing, with rips, or chains, or leather straps swinging and jingling in every direction. Their pale faces floated in the dark interior of the bar. The pictures of smiling carnival freaks smiled down at their strange uniforms, laughing and wondering who the real freaks were.
He refocused his attention on one man in the group that he had been watching. The man was lithe, his arms look liked plain bone underneath the velvety black of his skintight shirt. His lips were lined with silver piercings that reflected the light of the bar. His face was gentle and womanly, and he too wore eye makeup like the copper-haired girl he had killed the night before. What was her name? He had forgotten everything but the color of her hair. This man too had copper-colored hair and for the first time, he wanted someone to die. He wanted to slice this man to pieces, to make him pay for all of the things that he had had to do in the last few weeks. This man now became the focus of his rage, his hurt, his confusion.
He stood staring from the dark recess of the wall next to the glowingly pale face of Dracula, eyeing the man for most of the night. Finally, around 1:30 in the morning, the group decided to break-up. The women of the group, two of them, split, then one of the men left. The two remaining people, including his mark bellied up to the bar. They talked for a few minutes and then shook hands. His mark turned around to leave and he followed.
They milled through the crowd which had thinned considerably. He tried to hang back and match the man’s pace, but he stopped to converse with a face that he recognized. The conversation lasted a couple of minutes and then he was on his way again. Looking inconspicuous was more difficult than he thought, especially, when you were intent on not taking your eyes of your mark for even a second. That’s how long it took for a person to disappear, one second. The copper-haired man said his goodbyes again and moved on his way.
He strolled down the ramp without a care in the world. He paused only to light a cigarette that he had produced from his pocket. It was not a beauty like the Old Soldier’s; it was your typical cigarette, mass produced, filtered, and saturated in chemicals that didn’t belong there. He walked, smoke in hand, around the corner and out of sight.
He did not run, but he did pick up his pace. The man weaved drunkenly, whether he was truly drunk would remain to be seen.
The east side of Portland is an ugly place, an industrial place. Few people walk around the streets at night over on the east side; however, the people that did walk around were either too poor to give a shit about what went on or they were too busy causing trouble themselves. He followed the copper-haired man through the streets, through the crisp summer night and the hum of machinery from factories. The man’s boot heels scraped against the poorly paved surface of the streets. He walked down the middle staring up at the sky occasionally, gauging the age of the night or simply enjoying the sky; he didn’t know which and he didn’t care.
They finally came to an area where there were no people, and he decided to make his move. He stalked the man, as quietly as possible, watching the streetlights pass over his gleaming copper hair. Just as he was about to pounce on the man with the knife that he had produced, he turned around. His eyes widened in fear, and he stumbled backwards falling onto his rear end.
He dove at the copper-haired man just as he fell. He landed a short distance away, and both of them scrambled to get to their feet. He was first and he lashed out at the wobbly man in front of him, slicing the back part of the copper-haired man’s thigh with his knife. The man managed to stand up anyway and he took off down the street, away from the knife-wielding stranger that seemed intent on murdering him.
He caught up to the hamstringed man and grabbed him by his hair. The lower half of the man’s body kept running even as the top half’s momentum was stopped. This time he fell on his back and he brought his knife down in the middle of the man’s stomach, tearing a gash in his soft middle. The man struggled and threw punches desperately, landing a couple on his face and causing him to release his hold on the copper-haired man’s slick locks. The man tried to crawl away immediately, hoping beyond hope that he had knocked his attacker unconscious. He hadn’t, and as he crawled away holding his hand against his hot steaming insides and leaving a trail of blood like a slug, his attacker ran up behind him and he felt the cold metal of the knife, as if in slow motion, penetrate the back of his neck. One minute he was crawling, fighting for his life, and the next minute he felt as if he had grown a sharp metal tongue. Fortunately, the feeling didn’t last long and it was soon replaced by the rapidly fading feeling of someone giving him a hickie.
Chapter 43: The Water Waits
He stood over the body of his newest kill, feeling a thrill that he had never felt before. He didn’t know why he did it, but he drew three slash marks on the man’s face with the knife before plunging the wooden stake into the man’s heart. He wiped the bloody knife clean on the man’s skin tight shirt.
As he was tucking the knife away into a makeshift sheathe that had been fashioned by the Old Soldier, he heard the scrape of footwear on loose pavement. He whirled to see the Old Soldier standing off to the side smoking one of his beauties. He ran to the Old Soldier, who was still sporting that old Miami Vice look, and they made themselves scarce. They were far from home, at least a half an hour walk, and they didn’t really have time to hide the body. It would be good to get away from here as soon as possible.
They talked as they walked, it was better than being quiet.
“You kind of enjoyed that one, didn’t you,” the Old Soldier asked.
“Yeah… I guess so. It wasn’t like the other ones. It felt more honest; I wasn’t pretending. I wasn’t hiding. I think that makes a difference.”
They both fell quiet as a red-faced Stank walked past them, hands tucked deep in his pockets and eyes glued to the ground behind thick plastic glasses. They let him get half a block away before they began to talk again.
“Killing that guy was like, tracking a deer down with only a bow and arrow. It’s a good clean kill. It’s not like my dad used to do when he would sit in a tree all day and wait for a deer to come blundering into his sights. It wasn’t sneaky like that.”
“I thought you were going to fuck it up.”
He looked at the Old Soldier, surprised at his honesty. “You thought I’d fuck it up?”
“Well you weren’t exactly Jack the Ripper on those first two. You pretty much froze on them. Hell, if it weren’t for me, you’d probably be in jail or dead by now.”
“Thanks for your confidence, you old bastard.”
He laughed at the old man’s indignity. His wrinkled face screwed up in fury and then he too began laughing. When they stopped laughing, the Old Soldier handed out what appeared to be a compliment, “At least you’re getting better. Soon you won’t have to chase down skinny little vampires like that. You’ll be able to get them on the first try.”
Sirens pierced the night as they made their way across the Burnside Bridge, past Stanks on bikes and people more miserable than themselves. They passed people staring at the water, waiting for any excuse to jump in. One of them appeared to be a vampire, the black clothes, the face paint, it all fit the bill.
He stopped as he came next to the vampire peering down into the cold black water. The Old Soldier tugged on his arm as if to tell him to leave the man alone, but a brief tug was all the Old Soldier needed to feel the determination that ran through him. The Old Soldier left him to his business and removed himself twenty paces down the bridge, contemplating the black water of the river as it sloshed against the dirty green pylons of the bridge.
He stood there, aware of the distance between himself and the Old Soldier. Tears rolled down the young vampire’s face. It was a pitiful sight. His stomach roiled with curdled blood, whether from overfullness or disgust at the young vampire, he did not know.
“How long have you been here?” he asked the sad little demon.
“Half an hour,” he spilled from his lips with no emotion.
“Are you thinking about jumping?” He examined the vampire’s face, looking for clues to his state of mind.
“Maybe… I don’t know. It just all seems so useless.”
Unmade: A Neo-Nihilist Vampire Tale Page 15