“I’m dead in a literal way, therefore I have no need for a name… and I don’t give you the name that I used to go by when I was alive, because that person… that existence was pure, unspoiled, and I won’t have you destroy that person.”
The Chief mulled this over in his mind for a few seconds. “You mean you don’t want to soil who you were with what you have become. I can understand that. I get it.” He didn’t say anything in response and they sat in silence for a few minutes.
“You seem shocked that I can even understand you. You think you got the corner on weird thinking? I’ve talked to Jesus Christ sitting in that same chair… after he killed his whole family so that they could go to Heaven. I’ve talked to a rapist that insisted he was just a ghost and that the women he raped shouldn’t have been able to feel anything… I’ve had conversations with Liza Minelli, Barbara Streisand, and some guy that thought he was Michael Jackson… so what are you? Clearly you’ve got some fucked up ideas about the world… so where do they come from?”
He smiled, knowing how crazy it was going to sound, “I’m a vampire.”
This set the Chief rolling. He grabbed his sides as he burst into laughter. The Chief got up out his chair and left the room wheezing with laughter and coughing in big phlegmy fits. He called the Samoan dude and Vincent Price back into the room and he stood there trying to catch his breath.
“Tell ‘em what you told me, Dead Man.” The Chief doubled over, trying to catch his breath with his hands on his knees as his two officers waited to hear what he was going to say.
“I’m a vampire.”
The room erupted into more laughter and he couldn’t help but smile as the cops held onto each other, incapacitated by laughter, their eyes teared up and their faces turned red with the strain of it. They would just about get under control when the Chief would mutter “a vampire” through wheezed breath and then they’d be off again. This went off and on for four or five minutes, and then the Samoan dude and Vincent Price wandered off into the hall, wiping tears from their eyes and still giggling, he could hear them from the other side of the brown door with the brass doorknob as they closed it behind them.
The Chief wandered over to his seat, his bulk shifting with each stride. He pulled the wooden chair out and plopped down. The chair creaked under his weight but it appeared to be a lot less rickety than the chair that he sat in. The Chief fumbled around in his pocket for his pack of cigarettes… finding them he pulled out two. He lit the first one and then handed it to him across the table. He grabbed it and placed the cigarette in his mouth, inhaling the bitter, lung-burning smoke in a deep drag. He liked the smell; it reminded him of a friend. The Chief then lit his own cigarette with a tiny red lighter, like a miniature version of a real lighter… a lighter for children maybe.
The fluorescent light in the room made their smoke look ugly. It billowed and hung like smog, clinging to their skin and their clothes. He wondered if he would get a change of clothes. He certainly didn’t want to smell like a middle-school boiler room, where all the teachers go to smoke.
The Chief leaned back puffing languorously on his burning bundle of tobacco rolled in chemically-treated paper; sweat beaded on his forehead, turned cold and ran down his face. The Chief smiled at him… put off guard and appreciative of the man that sat across from him.
The Chief flicked ash on the floor as he spoke again, “You know, for a crazy bastard. You’re pretty funny. So let me ask you, are you serious about that vampire shit?”
He took a puff from his own cigarette, enjoying the burn and the few seconds it offered to allow him to collect his thoughts. Smokers were the best people to hold conversations with; their thoughts were always collected and arranged in mid-puff, none of that mindless call and response action. The smoker would listen to you when you talked, because they always had time to compose their own thoughts instead of barely listening to you while trying to think up a response on the fly.
“I’m dead serious,” he smiled as soon as he said it, and The Chief couldn’t help but laugh at the pun. He leaned back in his wooden chair and when his laughter died down they stared at each other for an uncomfortable set of seconds. The Chief seemed to realize that, despite the pun, he was indeed serious.
“Hold on a second. I’ll be right back.” The Chief left the room closing the door behind him, he heard the door’s lock click as he left. Clearly they were taking no chances with him. He pulled on his handcuffs gritting his teeth at the pain of hard steel digging into his wrist bones. It was no use, he might as well be chained to a skyscraper… the table wasn’t going to budge. He would have to grind his wrist down and crush the bones to get his hand out of those cuffs, and that would probably be quicker than trying to break the table. It didn’t matter anyway; the Chief was only gone for a few seconds. When he came in he was puffing with exerted effort and a sort of giddy excitement.
“Alright, buddy. Look into this and tell me what you see.” The Chief handed him a mirror.
He grabbed the mirror with his free hand after dropping his cigarette on the floor and snuffing it out with the toe of his shoe. Before he looked in the mirror he looked at the Chief as if to say, “None of this matters.” He looked into a woman’s tiny compact, probably one of the clerks he had seen in the room outside of this one. There was his face, pale and scarred, scabs and bruises still clung to his face. He looked like he had a skin disease, due to all the scabs and bruises. His lip was split in a nice red line that ran a centimeter up, where a boot toe had made contact with his mouth, squeezing the flesh against his teeth until it had split. His eyes looked like deep brown pits, set into the angular features of his skull. He looked like a skeleton covered in blood.
“What do you see, boy?”
“I see me… I see what I’ve become.”
“Vampires don’t have reflections.” The Chief sat back and waited for him to respond.
“Do you believe everything you see in the movies?”
“Well, shit man. Just look at your face. Shouldn’t your flesh be knitting up right now? Shouldn’t those bruises be disappearing before my very eyes?”
“It’s not like that, Chief. That isn’t the way it works.”
“Well you tell me how it works then, because all I see in front of me is a sick man that’s caused a lot of hurt and killed a lot of people.”
“I am a vampire… you can beat the shit out of me, and you can break the fuck out of me, but I’m still gonna keep coming. I may have to lay in a ditch for a while, but sooner or later, my shit will be healed and I’ll be just like I was before, scarred and tired, but just the same.”
“So tell me vampire, did you or did you not suck the blood of these people?”
“I didn’t suck the blood of everyone. I don’t need to feed that much, and it takes a lot longer to drain someone of their blood than you would think. More time than you have when you’ve got to take out a couple people.”
“Even a kid?”
He leaned back in his seat, uncomfortable with where the conversation had gone. It was like someone you didn’t even know pointing out and bringing up your biggest shame, the one that no one knew about… the secret shame that you yourself barely ever thought of because you had buried it at the back of your mind, because it hurt and it was wrong and deep down you were embarrassed about it, even if you tried not to admit it to yourself.
“What’s the matter, Dead Man? Did we hit a sore spot? What’s a kid to a vampire like yourself? You got a little remorse in there, I can see that. You’re not completely crazy are you?
The Chief flipped open a file that had been lying on the table untouched. There were papers and reports as well as some pictures. He found the picture that he was looking for and flipped it across to him.
He picked the picture up and looked at it. It showed the kid, pinned to a dead woman by a stake that he had stabbed the kid with, blood lay in black pools that were only recognizable as blood around the edges where it was thin enough to show as red. He f
elt nothing.
“It had to be done. One kid is nothing with the amount of pain and death that these people cause. That kid may not have been a vampire, but he would have become one… he would have grown up to kill, just like the others.”
The Chief looked at him in a sad way. “That was just a boy. Those people weren’t vampires. They were people like you or me. There’s no proof for what you’re saying. Other than the blood you spilled there, there isn’t a single piece of evidence to support what you say.”
“No, it isn’t true. They’ve got everyone fooled. Those were killers… vampires. I’m doing this for you, for everyone.”
The Chief sat back, clearly at a loss for words. “Why are you doing this then? If you’re a vampire and they’re vampires, hypothetically, why would you want to kill them?”
Tears sprang to his eyes, “I’m not supposed to be this. I never asked to be this. I wouldn’t want anyone else to have to go through what I’ve gone through. You call me a killer… I’m just a victim.”
The Chief got up from his chair, “Sure pal, you’re the victim, and a vampire, and a killer of families and innocent people. You’re in a bad way, Dead Man. Your brain is scrambled. I don’t think you even know what is real anymore.”
The Chief shuffled through more of the photos on the desk and tossed another over to him. He picked it up and looked at it. It showed the Old Soldier in a gutter, his jugular ripped and torn and a small puddle of blood around his head. Except for the blood and the tear in his neck, he could have been a bum passed out drunk. Part of him wished that was what he was looking at.
“What about that guy, was he a vampire?”
He looked at the picture a little longer, etching it into his mind, into his memory, “No… he was my friend.”
“Was he a vampire?”
“No, he was just a bum, a damaged man.”
“What do you mean damaged?”
“He was kind of fucked up from the war; he was a little off his rocker; I suppose that’s why he stuck with me so long.”
“What war?”
“He was in Vietnam.”
The Chief sat down and handed him a cigarette. “That guy wasn’t in 'Nam.”
It took him a while to register what the Chief was saying, but then it hit him and it hit him hard.
“What do you mean he wasn’t in Nam? That’s bullshit. He told me stories.”
“Maybe he told you stories, but that guy was never in 'Nam.”
“That’s bullshit and you know it.”
“Really? You think I’m fucking lying to you? Here take a look at his file… this is everything we got on your buddy.” The Chief tossed a thin file over to him nonchalantly.
It said “Gordon Stanton” on the file, the Old Soldier’s name was Gordon… funny, he didn’t look like a Gordon. Apparently, he didn’t look like a lot of things that he was. He read the file in growing horror. Gordon Stanton had been considered clinically crazy for quite some time. He had spent the majority of his youth in a mental institution, even the years during Vietnam. During the war, he was listed as having been a guest at an Oregon State Mental Institution in Marion County, committed after a series of paranoid delusions forced his parents to lock him up. He had stayed in there for a while, until the state turned the hospital into a prison and he was kicked out onto the streets. He had been arrested for vagrancy, petty theft, and public indecency several times throughout the years, but none of it said anything about him being a war veteran. He had just been a crazy old bum that could spin a tale. Who knew? Maybe Gordon Stanton even believed that he had been in the war.
He grabbed the cigarette the Chief had given him with a trembling hand and gestured to the man that he wanted a light. The Chief handed the lighter over to him and he lit the cigarette; this time the smoke reminded him of an old guy that had been crazy and fucked up for his entire life. For the first time, doubt crept into his mind just like the smoke crept into his lungs.
“When Mr. Stanton showed up dead, we had to scramble. You see we were on to Mr. Stanton. Crazy people don’t cover their tracks very well, but you were like a fucking ninja. Then this girl comes into us, hot little number. You may remember her; you tried to suck the life out of her tonight. She starts talking about how her brother and her friend were killed and she thinks she’s next… because of you.”
“So you guys were waiting.”
“Yeah, and you stroll in like some skinny Van Helsing with your bag full of stakes and spattered with blood. Tell me, Dead Man. How many people did you kill?”
“Two.”
“Two? I got a hell of a bigger body count than that. Maybe you killed so many people you can’t remember.”
“Oh, three… I killed three people. I forgot about my neighbor, plus the kid and the Old Soldier… that makes three.”
“So who killed those other people?”
“Those weren’t people, so they don’t count. No one complains when a doctor wipes out an infection or a virus… even though those are independent organism, even though they are alive. These things are the same, a disease that preys on us, kills us and spreads. Just because they look like people and talk like people doesn’t make me any different from a doctor.”
“Viruses don’t walk around and talk. Viruses don’t cry about how their brother was murdered in an alley. I’ve never had a virus walk through these doors and start crying about how they were scared they were going to get killed.”
He smoked his cigarette in silence.
Exasperated, he finally said, "You don’t get it do you? You won’t let yourself see. You’re blinded. Unable to admit that something you don’t know is out there doing things you are sworn to prevent.”
“The only thing I’m trying to stop here is a psycho killer. We got the bodies and the proof… and now we have you. So I guess I’ve done my job because you’re sitting here and no one is dying tonight.”
He leaned back and took a last puff off of the cigarette, dropped it on the floor and snuffed it out with the toes of his shoe.
“Maybe… maybe not.”
The Chief got up out of his seat and called the officers in to remove him. They undid his handcuffs and led him back to the cell with little fuss from him. His mind whirled with the possibilities, as the door was popped open and he was thrust inside. The Samoan dude took off his handcuffs and gave him a shot in the gut before he left. He doubled over in pain on the shitty cot that was in his cell.
He couldn’t help but wonder what was going to happen when the sun came over the horizon.
Chapter 59: Split Brats
Amid the coughs and the sickness of the cellblock, he waited. He waited for the truth hurtling toward him at 736 miles per hour. It floated out there, in space. A giant eye hovering in the middle of nothing, ready to decide whether he was going to live or die. It seemed silly when you thought about it… the sun killing him. Maybe it was like a really bad sunburn… maybe when he had become a vampire, if he had become a vampire, his skin had ceased to create any sort of ability to fight the sun. Maybe when that giant eye came over the edge of the windowsill he would just disappear in a puff of dust. Poof… no more.
Or maybe the sun would come up and he would just sit there, getting a tan and waiting for the hammer of the law to drop on him. He would be branded a psycho, get thrown in a maximum security prison and rot for the rest of his days. Perhaps he would be a guinea pig. Maybe when he got older and died his autopsy would be a special treat for some lucky criminologist interested in figuring out what exactly had been wrong with him. With any luck they would make plasticized cross-sections of his brain and parade his corpse around the world… a never ending tour of sideshow excess disguised in scientific trappings. Come! See the brain of the man that thought he was a vampire! See the brain of the man that killed his friend, watched his family die, and then killed other families! Wouldn’t that be something? He wondered if he would pay to see such an experience.
The cellblock whirred with unadulterated nor
mality. People in cells held heated debates about which actress was hotter, what they had done to get in here, and where someone could score some drugs. The hardened spoke in a manner that belied the life they had, while the soft clung to corners trying to look like anything but a victim and succeeding only in making themselves look like even more of a victim. The fluorescent lights buzzed in the ceiling as the prisoners stalked around their cells like chickens pecking at the ground for seed.
He saw a tiny sliver of it at first… just a little crack of yellow. From his vantage point on his cot he could see the sky turning orange and pink, a fireworks show just for him. Puffy white clouds filled the sky like tumors, floating through the lungs of the world. The sky spread out painfully small in the tiny rectangular vision of the window, impossibly large through such a small space. He stood on his cot, watching and waiting as the sliver grew in size, expanding and approaching him where he sat on his cot as the angle of the sun changed. For a second, he felt like James Bond in one of his many movies, lying on a table and waiting for a laser to split his junk in two. Only he wouldn’t be fighting. He wouldn’t cower in a corner hiding from what should have happened to him long ago, besides, it was much better to be burned up than rot in a cell.
The sliver grew thick, expanding, encompassing the room and brightening it to an unbearable level. His head ached with the sight of something he hadn’t seen in forever, the brightness washed out the details of the cell and the hum of the prisoners. It was as if he could hear the sun moving, frying everything it touched in waves of radioactive energy. The roar of the sunlight filled his head, and when the light filled up a good majority of the room, enough to encompass his whole body, he jumped off of his cot and ripped his clothes off, staring into the offending body of gas and heat.
As he stood in the sun, basking and baking in its early morning heat, he finally knew. He could hear Leroy screaming out for the guards as his skin started to blacken and become hard, he could feel his eyes turn into rocks and his mouth fall open as it too blackened. The pain flooded his body and he burned all over.
Unmade: A Neo-Nihilist Vampire Tale Page 21