Unmade: A Neo-Nihilist Vampire Tale

by Vocabulariast, The

  Chapter 48: Like a Slug in the Sun

  The Old Soldier hunkered down on the porch, tossing the lit nub of one of his beauties into the woman’s pool of blood with a hiss.

  “I’ll wait here, just in case any of them tries to get out. You go in there, be a shadow, and take them as quietly as possible. We don’t need any neighbors calling the cops.”

  He turned to go inside. The door handle turned easily enough and when he opened the door he saw the dim interior of the monsters’ lair. Trendy, recycled furniture filled the living room and at the back of the room he could see a hallway with a light, which gave him just enough light to maneuver by. Books littered the glass coffee table, nothing diabolic, just a couple tomes scattered among mindless magazines. The couches were arranged around the TV, clearly a focal point for gathering as the walls were lines with racks of DVD’s. Dark art covered the walls, pictures of winged creatures, runny and blurred as if they had been left out in the rain, pictures of dark goddesses bound, tortured and shining. Candles stood in pewter sconces that were affixed to the walls… there were no body parts, no drained corpses… but he never killed where he slept, so it kind of made sense.

  He walked to the back of the living room and peered around the corner, looking down the hallway… there were two doors on the left side of the hallway and two doors on the right… pictures of unfamiliar faces hung on the walls, smiling faces full of teeth. He could hear faint noises coming from the room on the left at the end of the hallway. He moved slowly, the wall seeming to crawl by him, faces flashing for brief seconds, ghosts of the living.

  The first door he came to was on the right, he dropped to his knees to look underneath the doorway. No light came from the room so he slowly opened the door. He found the tall dude lying on his bed with his feet hanging off. The light from the hallway splashed on the back of the man’s legs, but went no further. He was lying on his stomach with his face buried in a pillow

  . The man must have sensed his presence because he managed to mumble in his pillow, “No, no more shots… I have to sleep.”

  He rushed at the sleeping man with his knife held point down, and drove it through the man’s neck, he felt the resistance of vertebrae, and then the knife made it through the other side with hardly a sound… like stabbing a watermelon, only instead of breaking through the rind, you have to break through a neck. The man’s legs kicked and spasmed for a few seconds and then he rolled him over on his back. His eyes stared into space, dark and empty, his mouth open and contorted in pain, blood ran in two diverging rivers down the sides of his neck where the knife had gone all the way through transforming the white sheets into blooms of crimson.

  He backed out of the room and prepared himself for the next room, which was the first door on the left. A do not disturb sign, stolen from a Motel 8 apparently, hung on the doorknob. He turned the knob and a sliver of red light jetted into the hallway… he hissed slowly as he opened the door, silently cursing himself for not checking for light. Nothing happened immediately so he continued to open the door… taking his time. As the door was opened just enough for him to get his head through, he heard a voice from the other side of the door ask, “Coming to join me, Johnny?”

  He reached his hand in and flicked off the light switch next to the door… and then he threw the door open… the light from the hallway blinded the woman on the bed, dressed only in a pair of black panties with one hand down her pants working her stuff like a Rubik’s Cube. He advanced on her and she leaned her head back and closed her eyes, rubbing her stuff with her free hand faster and more violently, lost in lust and pleasure. He moved to stand next to her while she masturbated on the bed. Her head was at just the right height so just for fun he unzipped his pants, fast enough so that it made that trademark zipper sound. Without opening her eyes she closed her mouth around his hard steel, giving a violent slurp, which quickly turned to pained shock. Her eyes shot open and her mouth began to ooze blood. She looked down to see that it wasn’t Johnny’s cock she had been sucking on, but the tangy metal of his knife. She coughed on the blood that was oozing from her tongue and she tried to get up off the bed, her arms flailing and her mouth open in an “O” of silent pain. He grabbed her by the hair on the back of her head and flung her down on the bed, and just as she thought to scream for help, he brought the knife down, a quick shhh of the knife and her screams were no more. She continued to kick and bleed for some time her breasts jiggling like bowls of Jell-O, interesting to watch but he was still glad when it was over… her hair had been quite oily and her pussy had a definite unpleasant odor to it.

  He zipped up his pants with his non-oily hand and wiped it on the sheets of the woman’s bed. The red light splashed the walls gruesomely showing pewter frames of pale smiling faces posed in fake smiles. He moved to the hallway again as the noises from the last room on the left began to intensify. There were two people in that room, engaged in something sexual if he wasn’t mistaken, the trademark sound of nuts slapping on an ass and moans of pleasure. He readied himself for what was going to come next. He stalked down the hallway placing one foot in front of the other, methodically placing each heel and rocking to the toe of his foot. The door inched ever closer and then he was standing in front of it, looking at cheap wood, lazily painted white with dried runs of paint bulging out from the flatness of the door.

  Slowly he opened the door to see the bunching buttocks of a man busy thrusting his junk into a woman on all fours. Their backs were to him, so he crept up behind the man, his long stringy black hair cascading over his shoulders and sweat dripping down his spine. With the speed of a humming bird he leapt to the man’s side and cut off his penis in mid thrust, the man’s face turned to him pained and furious and that’s when he thrust the knife through his eye. It felt like a fork going into some cheese until it reached the optical nerve bundle at the back of the eye and then it was like trying to puncture a tennis ball with a butterknife. The man’s body shook and for a second it looked like he was still trying to fuck the air with his stump of a penis and testicals covered in blood.

  The woman scrambled off of her knees and flipped into a sitting position on her butt. She scrabbled backwards leaving her man’s blood stains all over the sheets, and as she bumped up against the wall she looked down at herself with growing horror. With the dexterity of a junky going through d.t.’s, she reached between her legs and pulled the man’s limp penis from her vagina, its hardness sapped by blood loss. She managed to scream once… not the unintelligible scream of horror that you see in the movies, but a deep, frantic scream for help that rattled the walls and forced him into action. He dove across the bed with his knife held out in front of him and drove it through her mouth and out the back of her head, pinning her against the wall… and yet she still screamed, until he wrapped his hands around her throat and squeezed. Still he could feel the pressure of her lungs trying to gasp for air to let out more of those horrid screams. He choked and crushed with his hands like vices, and her eyes wiggled around trying to find anything to help her, and finding nothing she began bashing him in the face with her fists, silver rings bringing forth cuts and gashes like he was having his face scrubbed with a wash cloth filled with broken shards of glass. He closed his eyes to avoid any ocular damage and to get away from the panicked stair of the woman he was strangling. She changed from punching him to clawing, which faded to even weaker slaps, and finally devolved into a soft caress. It reminded him of his wife, when they used to lay in bed… until he opened his eyes and he saw the woman’s brutal stare and her face contorted in rage around the hilt of his knife. He let go in an experimental fashion and he jumped as a last bit of trapped, but lifeless, air escaped her crushed throat. As he stood up, he watched the man’s severed penis shrivel like a slug in the sun.

  Chapter 49: It's Done

  He wandered through the hallway past the obituary pictures of the dead, their eyes seeming to follow him with disapproving stares. He walked past the stubs of melted down candles in their p
ewter sconces, red runs of wax hardened in mid-drip. He opened the door with the exhaustion of a marathon runner leaning on it and heaving with the abusive feel of adrenaline in his muscles and blood running down his face from a multitude of scratches. The Old Soldier was there waiting, his eyes wide. He glanced around like an old timey villain, his hands clasped together, kneading each other.

  “It’s done,” he managed to spit.

  The Old Soldier grabbed the old bowling bag and walked into the house, like a plumber ready to fix some pipes.

  “Jesus Christ boy, I told you to be quiet about it. What was that last noise? Sounded like a Saint Bernard raping a Chihuahua.”

  As he leaned down to pull the corpse inside, he said, “The last one was a screamer.”

  The Old Soldier took in his surroundings and then opened up the bag, pulling out a stake and handing it to him as he took one himself.

  “Well, where are they… we don’t want to be here all night and it’s already pretty late.”

  They walked back into the rooms, burying wood in the hearts of the dead… ignoring the pictures of carnage as if they were just planting flowers instead of mutilating the deceased. When they got to the last room, the Old Soldier let out a “Jesus” but said nothing else. He almost fell over backwards when he was removing the knife from the wall… “Must have hit a stud,” was all he said.

  As they were packing up, the last door on the right side of the hall opened up and a set of tiny eyes dressed in pajamas peered up at them. Neither of them knew what to do, so they simply stood there as the boy walked into the room with the dead couple. The boy rubbed his eyes, and his lower lip started trembling. He turned to look at the two of them, terrified and sad at the same time and then he ran past them and into the room where the other woman lay topless and bloody with a stake through her heart. The boy’s plaintive wail broke the stillness of the moment and he ran into the room to see the boy curled up with his mother, oblivious to the bloodstains that were soaking his Pokemon pajamas. A thin thread of drool ran from his mouth as he clutched his mother’s cold body, and the boys tears diluted the blood that was coagulating on her neck. The boys cries became louder, more intense, until they seemed to echo off of the walls… he pulled out his knife out from the makeshift leather sheathe.

  He could hear the Old Soldier behind him… “No, don’t…”

  But it had to be done, he plunged the knife into the boy’s neck at the base of his skull, giving it a quick twist. He put his mouth over the wound at the back of the kids neck and enjoyed the rich rush of flavors that came from the kid. His experience was much simpler, less refined… the flavors of hamburgers, hot dogs, a Happy Meal, cake, and ice cream… all those happy foods you could get away with gorging on when you were a kid. He didn’t want to let go, but he did. The feeding came to a stop and he walked over to the Old Soldier whose mouth hung open, one hand clutching at the inside of his pocket for one of his beauties and the other limply holding onto the old bowling bag full of stakes.

  “Give me one,” he said. The Old Soldier simply looked at him, still fumbling for a cigarette.

  “You can’t… he’s just a boy…”

  “What’s done is done, but we need to finish what we started.”

  “You shouldn’t have killed him… you didn’t have to kill him.” The Old Soldier kept rambling on about “shouldn’t” and “didn’t have to” so he just reached into the bag at the Old Soldier’s side and pulled out a stake, annoyed at the old man’s sudden weakness. He jammed it in, just like he would have for an adult and the stake went all the way through the boy’s scrawny chest to stick out the back, pinning him to his dead mother, the way his head was twisted, it looked as if he was breast feeding.

  “There, it’s done… now let’s get the hell out of here.” The Old Soldier stumbled along after him, tears in his eyes, as he polished up the place, removing fingerprints… and fingers with his skin underneath the fingernails on them. When he was done he wrapped the fingers covered in silver rings in wads of toilet paper and shoved them into the old bowling bag. The Old Soldier dropped the bag after he did this, and he had to carry it himself. They left as silently as they had came, a house with an unlocked door and six mutilated bodies… six more vampires that wouldn’t be killing anyone else, repaid for all the brutality and pain that they had caused. It was a good night.

  Chapter 50: Too Far

  It was about four in the morning and the summer sky had begun to lighten in the east. They had to hurry if they wanted to get back to the apartment before the sun came up. At least there wouldn’t be a maze of police cars and searchlights to traverse. The way home was just as clear as when they had come. Silence took over the heat of the night as the wind picked up ruffling their hair like two triumphant souls standing on the top of a mountain. He wondered what type of flag he would plant in the top of a mountain; isn’t that what mountain climbers did? Take their little flag and jab the wooden stick it was attached to into the pristine snow.

  The Old Soldier hobbled along, much less drunk than he had been earlier. The streets were empty except for the occasional gust of wind driven paper and the scrape of their shoes on the streets.

  The Old Soldier looked at him and stopped, while he kept on walking. “Kid, I don’t think I can do this anymore.”

  They were standing on the corner of Grand and Burnside, just a couple of blocks before where the Burnside Bridge started.

  He stopped and turned around at the Old Soldier’s words, equal parts surprised and pissed off. “What do you mean you can’t do this anymore?”

  The Old Soldier paused before he answered, pained and reticent. “That kid was just too much, I don’t think what we’re doing is right anymore. Jesus, he was just a kid.”

  “Don’t you know that nits make lice? Don’t you know that a little bastard like that could grow up to be the worst of the bunch? We did that fucker a favor, and you’re bitching out on me because of it?”

  The Old Soldier paused, thinking and pulled one of his beauties out of his pocket, lighting it with match. He didn’t seem to know what to say.

  “C’mon, we gotta get going. The sun’s gonna be up soon, and we haven’t even crossed the bridge yet.”

  The Old Soldier made like he was going to take a step and then he paused… “I’m not going. You’re on your own now, kid. You got it in you to do this on your own. You ain’t human anymore… you’re a monster.”

  He could see that it had taken the Old Soldier an amazing amount of strength to say what he had to say, but that didn’t lessen the pain of the blow. For a second, he just stood there watching the Old Soldier puff on his beauty, making little flares of orange light and filling the air with wisps of smoke that danced away from his lips like breath in the winter… only these stayed, these lingered.

  “Alright then. I guess that’s that. I’d rather you stay, but if you don’t have the heart for it… what am I gonna do?”

  He leaned against the wall and let the Old Soldier finish his cigarette. “Do you wish you’d never found me?”

  The Old Soldier inhaled like an asthmatic, shaky and constricted… “Kid, I wish I had just left you there to die. It’s what you wanted, it’s what you should have had. You don’t belong in this world anymore, and if I knew what you were going to become I would have driven a stake through your heart on the spot.” The Old Soldier finished up his beauty and held out his hand, “I guess this is the part where we go our own ways.”

  He returned the Old Soldier’s handshake even though he felt like crying… almost. “If you change your mind, you know where to find me.”

  “You ain’t got to worry about that kid. I got to get out of this place.” The Old Soldier turned around to go in the opposite direction and that’s when he grabbed him, grabbed that stinky old hypocrite with his forearm around his throat, and ripped into his neck with his teeth. The Old Soldier flailed and struggled as he clamped his mouth over the Old Soldier’s wound and began to gulp down the hot red fluid.
His mind was flooded with images and flavors as he dragged the Old Soldier’s body back into the shadows of a building. Alcohol flavors filled his mouth everything from cheap whiskey, convenience store wine and even some expensive champagne… the tastes of a lifetime, so small so unvaried. The Old Soldier’s blood was thin and poured out of him quicker than most… he was gone in a manner of minutes and he stood up from his feast and examined the work he had done.

  He felt like shit, complete and utter shit… flies and everything. The Old Soldier’s body curled on the cold concrete like he was sleeping. A part of him wanted the Old Soldier to wake up. A part of him wanted the Old Soldier to be just like he was. He let the man lay there and picked up the old bowling bag that had been dropped when he had attacked the Old Soldier. He peered inside to see that there was just one stake, buried under a mound of severed fingers covered in silver rings. He dug in the bag trying to pull the stake free without spilling fingers all over the sidewalk. Then he did what he thought was right.

  He made his way through the city streets, with quick harried steps. It was as if he could feel the sun rising over the earth… he felt like a giant running around a quickly spinning earth, always trying to stay in the darkness while the light from the sun loomed just behind him, a never-ending treadmill that would lead to his death in one way or another.

  People started to appear, not a lot, but a few. City workers with spray hoses, blasting the sidewalks with water to keep them clean, as if that were important. Dustcarts and street sweepers clearing the streets of the night’s filth… would one of those sweep the Old Soldier’s body up? Would a pointless, power-washing bastard come along and blast the Old Soldier’s body into a gutter, just to have a street sweeper come along and sweep his body into a bin… so that he could be deposited at the dump to rot into nothing, while bottle caps and cigarette butts outlasted his decaying bones on this earth. Let the city rot, let the city crumble and fade into nothing. Bring the buildings down with the sledgehammer of time and erosion. Let garbage lay on the street; let people see what they make every day. Don’t hide it in some out of the way place and stack it pile upon pile, pretending that that shit is going to go away. He imagined the earth sometime in the future with a new layer. No more crust, mantle and core,… in the future it would be crust, landfill, bottle caps and cigarette butts, mantle and then core… who knows maybe the core will be gone by then, and all that will be left is a skeleton of a society that covered itself in garbage like a bum looking for insulation on a cold winter night… frozen in the waste of a people that just didn’t care.