Unmade: A Neo-Nihilist Vampire Tale

by Vocabulariast, The

  He made it to his apartment, just as the sun came over the horizon. He climbed up his shadowed staircase, and turned around to glance at the morning’s early rays splashed on the sidewalk below his shaded hiding place. It burnt his eyes and gave him a headache. He climbed into his coffin, closed the lid, and cried for some indeterminable reason as he breathed the stale cigarette and whiskey stained air that was trapped in the coffin with him.

  Chapter 51: A Weapon of Great Design

  When he woke up later that night, climbing from the stale air of his coffin, he was surprised to find that the Old Soldier was not there, then it all came back to him. Maybe the child had been a mistake… maybe. Who knew what a vampire was willing to do? He wondered what he would do if he had the opportunity to turn his daughter into a vampire, or his wife. Would he do it? Would he make them have the life that he was now living?

  He couldn’t do that to them. No one deserved to be forced to live like that, if you could even call it living. He looked around the room, feeling the emptiness of the place. Somehow it felt smaller without the Old Soldier curled up in a comatose ball on the floor with smudges on the wall where he had snuffed out his beauties. Now it looked like a discount construction material store. Chunks of wood stood in the corner, ready to be turned into stakes, a hammer rested in the corner, and a staple gun sat next to it. There was no art, no decoration, nothing to really say that anyone even lived there; no one really did when you thought about it.

  He wandered into the bathroom and splashed some water on his face… looking at it for the first time in weeks. Gaunt and pale, his eyes were ringed by purplish bruises that made him look like something of a raccoon. Scratches covered his face, healing quickly but they’d be there for a while. Red crusty scabs protruded from the smoothness of his pail skin. A blind person might be able to tell an interesting tale using those.

  He put a wife beater over his skeletal frame and walked down the stairs to the street. The night was cooler, the heat had moved out during the day and clouds had moved in. It wasn’t cold out, your beer would probably still heat up in ten or fifteen minutes if you didn’t down it quickly enough, but it was an improvement over the previous weeks’ unbearable heatwave.

  He walked to the corner where boxes filled with meaningless papers collected, rotted, and waited to be saved from their horrible imprisonment inside blue and yellow plastic boxes, one of which was shaped like a house. He plopped a couple of quarters inside the blue metal box that said “The Oregonian” on the side of it, pulled down the door, lifted out a paper, and let the door slam shut without a care for how much noise it would make.

  He stumbled back the way he had come, up the stairs, and into his apartment. He took a seat on the floor and examined the newspaper. The front page was filled with something about the President being a fuck up… news from the war. Basically, a whole lot of nothing. In the right corner of the front page, he found what he was looking for. A title reading Vampire slasher kills again: 6 dead and one possibly connected murder in SE. He turned to the page reading the story. The story did a perfunctory job of relating the carnage he had caused, glossing over the violence with the words “mutilated corpses.” The newspaper writer made the child’s death seem more important than any of the other people, which made him laugh. The story even talked about the Old Soldier, saying, “The body of a homeless man was found a few blocks away, murdered in a similar fashion to the recent string of killings. Police are still unsure about the man’s connection to the murders and are working to figure out the man’s identity.” He threw the paper down in disgust, more at the writer than at himself. The reporter that wrote the story was just like all of the others, no curiosity, no real skill, just a simple reporting of facts… no inquiry as to the reason. As far as the world was concerned, he was just a psycho on a killing spree. Well, let them think what they will; he had a purpose, a destiny that would continue until he had completed his revenge.

  He got up off of his ass and walked over to where he had laid the knife after coming home. He picked it up and looked at its dulled edge, tiny flecks of gore and drying skin were stuck where the blade made the handle. He walked to the bathroom and scrubbed the knife, making sure that no offensive flesh clung to it. Then he sat on the floor polishing the blade and sharpening it on a whetstone, one of the things that the Old Soldier had taught him. When the blade was sharper than a razor, he grabbed a piece of wood and began turning it into a stake.

  He turned the piece of wood over in his hands, feeling its rough cut… cheap pine used for construction of cheap apartment complexes and townhouses built so close together that you could hear your neighbor farting and fucking. Coffins built so close together that a single match could destroy a hundred lives. He cut a slice of wood away. Cheap pine fell to the floor in an unceremonious pile, revealing the stake underneath, waiting to be exposed to the stale air of his apartment, waiting to be plunged into the breast of a monster… the wood thrummed in his hands, the blade whirring like a professional machine in a wood shop, turning a cheap piece of pine into a weapon of great design. This one was special; this one was made for the whore.

  Chapter 52: A Cup of Sugar

  He had spent most of the night before readying his arsenal. A pile of stakes stood off to the side and his most special stake twirled in his hands, smooth and lightweight; it felt special… it felt like the end. He knew that the stake would be the end of him, once it had been used, he would be done… and then he’d have to carve one more stake, but there was a lot to do before he could think about that.

  Hunger gnawed at him for one thing… but he couldn’t go to the club and hunt… not tonight; it was too soon. The heat was thick, literally and figuratively. The brief respite of coolness had left, clouds faded away like dreams and lives to be replaced by the stagnant leftover heat of the sun-baked city. The hunger was growing, he had no choice; he had to feed… and he wasn’t going to go out digging for rats. He was done with that shit. He was becoming a gourmet.

  He walked to the kitchen and rummaged through the cupboards, looking for something. He found it, an old plastic measuring cup with faded numbers. A small layer of cupboard dust had collected in the bottom of it, but that didn’t matter at the moment. He loaded up his knife, a stake and his measuring cup and walked downstairs to the apartment just below his.

  He kindly knocked on the door and listened. He could hear some scrambling on the other side of the door and then he was there, opening the door, a face he had seen a lifetime ago. The gaunt man hung in the doorway, a thin sheen of sweat on his forehead, and rings under his eyes.

  “What do you want?” he asked in an exasperated tone.

  “I just came to see if I could borrow a cup of sugar.”

  The neighbor looked around before he answered, “Where’s your vet. buddy? I ain’t seen him around in the last couple of days. I usually see him pissing on the stairs or rolling cigarettes at the bottom of the landing.”

  “I had to make him leave… he’s been getting a little preachy lately.”

  That decided it for the man. He opened the door wide and asked him to come in, snatching the cup from him and closing the door behind him.

  “I’ll give you a cup of sugar, but just because it’s actually been quiet around here the last couple days. I don’t know what you two were doing up there, but it sounded like two elephants fucking.”

  The man rambled on, obviously feeling that he could bust his balls since he was doing him such a grand favor. The man opened a cupboard in the kitchen and as he reached up to grab a rumpled sack of sugar, he brought the knife around the man’s throat slicing it gingerly. He spun the man around like a partner in some sort of bizarre dance routine and placed his lips on the man’s throat, slurping greedily. The man kicked and fought, screaming a little bit, but mostly just managing to make a mess out of all the things on the counter. A coffee pot fell to the ground, the glass carafe smashing into a thousand pieces. A fruit bowl was upended and bananas bounced with dull thuds
as apples rolled across the linoleum floor to come to rest on the carpet of the living room. They danced two paces to the left, and the neighbor reached his hands out for anything and came up with the handle to the refrigerator door. He pulled it open as they fell to the ground, dead white light covering their bodies in its cold embrace as refrigerator fog poured out into the heat of the apartment cooling them down.

  The flavors rushed into his head… tinged with sorrow and depression. The flood was bittersweet and melancholy, macaroni and cheese, mashed potatoes and gravy, fastfood, and TV dinners. The things a lonely man dines on. When he released the man, he still had some strength left in him. He laid bent with his back against the refrigerator, his arms moved weakly, reaching for the bottoms of his jeans, fighting for his life, however pitiful it was. His eyes turned to him and he looked like a junky struggling to communicate from the depths of euphoria, except right now he was on the other side of the spectrum. The man’s eyes were glazed and words began to tumble out of his mouth.

  “I’m sorry… so sorry… what a waste, I wasted my whole… for nothing.” His eyes went blank and his head lolled to the side.

  He pulled the stake from where he had tucked it in the back of his jeans and rammed it home. He dragged the body into the bathroom and threw it in the tub. He cursed himself for being so stupid. This wasn’t the type of neighborhood where a body could be dumped or even transported very easily. He was just going to have to leave it.

  He walked into the main room of the apartment, just like his but filled with trinkets, goods, racks of DVD’s, a TV, a futon… posters on the walls. He wandered around admiring the stuff the guy had bought, meaningless things to keep his mind from his sad little life. A briefcase sat at the edge of his futon, where he assumed the guy had spent the majority of his free time. He plopped onto the futon in a spot that was well-worn, well-used, and picked up the briefcase, snapping it open to reveal the contents inside. There was a collection of papers with numbers printed on them, pointless numbers that meant nothing. He tossed the briefcase on the floor and examined the DVD’s on the racks… half of them were pornography and the rest might as well have been… masturbatory horror flicks with busty chicks featured prominently on the covers, women in peril, action movies where muscular dudes mowed through uncountable numbers of faceless, uniformed soldiers for no real reason.

  The TV was exceptionally nice, it must have been a 44 incher with an LCD screen. He picked up the remote to see what the picture looked like. As the TV popped on, the picture showed up clear as day. It was the local news. The newscasters were busy bantering while the weatherman informed them that yes, more “great” weather was coming their way.

  “Wow thanks Steve, that’s some great news.” Like Steve has anything to fucking do with the weather. Everyone knows that Steve is just a face man. He probably doesn’t even read the meteorological instruments… there was probably a group of ugly scientists in some room a hundred miles away, a room full of the stuff. They would sit in their room reading numbers, looking at temperatures, barometric pressure, and Doppler radar putting all this shit together… and all Steve had to do was read a fucking teleprompter and click buttons on his damn remote.

  They were going to a commercial break, but before they did the airheaded blonde on the TV said, “Coming up on the other side of the break, see how firefighters helped save this kitten from being stuck in a tree, plus, if you’re looking for a way to stay cool, we’ll show you how some kids in SE are putting their ingenuity into action… then later, we’ve got some breaking news on the Vampire killer that has been terrorizing Portland.” He leaned forward and laughed… kittens in a tree. He was beaten by kittens in a tree. He supposed that was a good thing.

  The commercials came on. There was one that touted Channel 2 news as the number one local news station in Oregon. There was a commercial for some cleaning agent with a mom smiling happily, glad that she had gotten that stain out of her kids soccer uniform. There was a commercial for a trendy couple enjoying a ride through the country as their kids sat oblivious in the backseat, ear phones on their head, zombified by a DVD screen in the backseat.

  Then the news came on and he sat through the harrowing tale of a kitty in peril, the heartwarming show of entrepreneurial ingenuity as a group of kids sold lemonade to help a schoolmate that had been wounded in a drive-by shooting, and multiple scenes of kids playing in a fountain by the river. Then his story came on. They showed clips of police task force agents hypothesizing on who he was. According to the mustachioed cop on the screen he was quite disturbed, clearly suffering from some sort of delusion. The brutality of the crime scenes was quite startling… and if anyone had any information, the police should be notified immediately. The coolest thing was, that there was a reward out for any information that led to his arrest… $25,000, not bad.

  It sounded like the police had their thumbs up their asses… as usual. He flipped the channels, and finding nothing of interest, he began to look through the rest of the apartment. He found his neighbor’s wallet and took what little cash was in it. Dinner and some cash, what a gracious fellow. He took the man’s keys and left the apartment, turning off the TV before he left. He made sure the door was locked and as he was closing the door, he said, “Thanks for the sugar.”

  Chapter 53: De-evolution

  He wasted a few more days just kicking around in his apartment… loneliness absorbed him, a smothering blanket that clouded his mind and his thoughts. Visions of purple-black hair danced in his head, and he longed for the company of the Old Soldier. The newspapers on the window were stained yellow with nicotine and the carpet showed signs of his stay, the rock hard cigarette burns of synthetic material lined the carpet in the corner of the apartment.

  The day passed long, as he tossed and turned in his coffin… visions of death and brutality flooded him even more than the loneliness. His mind turned like a screw, delving deeper and deeper into the depths… where it overflowed with fears and desires that he had never known.

  In order to beat the monotony of waiting for the heat of the cops to die down, he would journey downstairs and visit his neighbor. His flesh had drained of color and the blood that he had left in the bathtub had turned a nasty yellowish color, the remains of plasma, dry like fossils. The neighbor swelled with the gas of the bacteria that were even now consuming his flesh. The stink was abysmal; the hot weather hadn’t helped any.

  He had gone to the store and purchased a couple of rolls of saran wrap and a lighter… to help with the smell as faint whiffs of it could already be detected on the landing to his apartment. He wrapped the neighbor in the saran wrap burning the ends together and snuffing out the flames with his fingertips quickly to make a hard seal. By the end of the venture, the neighbor looked like a new age mummy, resting in the bathtub with crinkles of saran wrap around his face. Only one eye was visible… open and decaying.

  The smell still lingered in the apartment, but after a couple of days, it dissipated on the landing. He watched a few of the man’s porno films, but found nothing exciting in them. A penis here, some tits there… some head. Still he managed to rub a couple out, wiping his seed on the stash of “important” papers in the man’s briefcase.

  While he was hanging out one day watching some cartoon about kids that captured animals and forced them to fight… a phone call interrupted his disgust. The phone rang four times before it clicked over to the answering machine, the mechanical voice of his neighbor came on, asking people to leave a message after the beep. How original.

  A voice spoke up after the beep, “Hi, it’s Marcia at work, we were just wondering how you were doing… we haven’t seen you in a couple of days. If you don’t come in tomorrow or we don’t receive a call from you, don’t bother coming back. Anyway, give us a call and let us know what is going on.” She rattled off the number like a robot… seven digits that connect you like a god to a magical answering machine… miles away.

  He let the woman finish her spiel and picked up the ph
one, dialing the numbers methodically… it rang four times and then the machine picked up… “Hi, Marcia, I was just returning your call to let you know that you’re a worthless cunt. If I ever see you or anyone else from that company, I’m going to come down there and stab you all in the face… except for you Marcia… I’ve got something special in mind for you.” He laughed as he hung up the phone, a brief giggle of amusement as he imagined the look on Marcia’s face when she listened to the message as her mind inevitably wandered to what “something special” might be.

  He drowned his loneliness with TV, brief questioning conversations with his mummified neighbor, and money shot reels that he found on the bonus features of porno DVD’s… white jets of semen spreading over women’s tongues, mouths, and eyes. But none of them had purple-black hair… and he was back to that again.