by Drew Stepek
BLOOD BOUND BOOKS
Copyright © 2017 by Drew Stepek
All rights reserved
ISBN 978-1-940250-29-8
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, business organizations, places, events and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Edited by Andrea Dawn
Interior Layout by Black Heart Edits
www.blackheartedits.com
Printed in the United States of America
First Edition
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www.bloodboundbooks.net
For Lisa.
The one who keeps me Drew…
grounded somewhere between Andy and RJ.
Children of the Night is a private, non-profit, tax-exempt organization founded in 1979. They are dedicated to assisting children between the ages of 11 and 17 who are forced to prostitute on the streets for food to eat and a place to sleep. They have rescued girls and boys from prostitution and the domination of vicious pimps, and they provide all programs with the support of private donations.
They are making a difference in the lives of hundreds of children each year. Their commitment to rescuing these children from the ravages of prostitution is shared with a small but committed group of detectives, FBI agents, and prosecutors in Los Angeles, Hollywood, Santa Ana, Anaheim, San Diego, other areas of California, Las Vegas, Portland, Billings, Montana; Seattle, Washington; Miami, New York, Minneapolis, Atlanta, Phoenix, Hawaii, and Washington D.C.—all stops on the child prostitution circuit. And their numbers keep growing as more and more dedicated individuals become concerned about the welfare of these desperate children.
Child prostitutes require specialized care for effective intervention. Most of the children victimized by prostitution were first victimized by a parent or early caregiver. Most have been tortured by treacherous pimps, and many testify in lengthy court proceedings against the pimps who have forced them to work as prostitutes.
In most cases these children do not have appropriate homes to return to, and the only relative who is a suitable guardian may live far away from the child’s hometown. For many the only option is an out of home placement, college dorm, maternity home, or mental health program. For those who reach 18 and need additional time to prepare to enter the mainstream society, independent living programs are recommended; special education programs are advised for those who need extra help with school, and alcohol or drug recovery homes are suggested for those with substance abuse problems.
Children of the Night is in demand to assist other agencies across the country and around the world to develop similar programs.
www.childrenofthenight.org
Up to 10% of the revenue from Knuckle Supper will be donated to Children of the Night.
I’ll never forget my first encounter with a punk vampire. I was about thirteen years old at the time, and I’d found an only-slightly-battered copy of John Skipp and Craig Spector’s 1986 opus The Light at the End. (I also managed to get my hands on a copy of Ray Garton’s Live Girls around that time, but that’s a story for another day.) Back then I was consuming vampire literature with a hunger that bordered on rapacious. I had already burned though more titles than I can list, including Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire and its grislier heir apparent, S.P. Somtow’s rock-‘n’-roll bloodsucker yarn Vampire Junction. Both of those novesl primed the pump for Skipp and Spector’s gory trip through a gritty and surreal New York City underworld, but the vamp that lurked in Light’s pages was far removed from Rice’s introspective Lestat and Somtow’s charismatic Timmy Valentine. Rudy Pasko was a Nosferatu for the age of splatterpunk: an all-too-human predator who lived on blood but thrived on degredation, rape, and brutal, frenzied murder.
So I’d like to think I was more prepared than most when I picked up Drew Stepek’s Knuckle Supper back in 2011. I didn’t know much about the book before I read it—only that it was about a punk vampire in Los Angeles, and that it was a response to the Twilight novels and their ilk. I assumed Drew didn’t care for the brooding neck-botherers that were rubbing their sparkly bits all over the bestseller list, and that he meant to put the bite back in vampire fiction. What Drew saw in those books, though, was something far more upsetting. The problem wasn’t that we’d romanticized vampires, he argued. It was that we’d turned them into pedophiles.
Knuckler Supper, then, pushed vampire literature into territory that was far more disturbing than any bloodsucker tale I’d experienced before. It wasn’t the gore that I found so unsettling—I cut my teeth on Faust comics and other underground horror fare in the ‘80s, so I’ve seen some things, man. What got me about Knuckle Supper was the desperate plight of the characters at its center: a murderous vampire junkie named RJ Reynolds and a twelve-year-old, very human prostitute known as Bait. If you’re reading these words, it’s probably not a spoiler to say that Bait’s story didn’t end well. RJ, though… well, RJ is complicated. He might still have a shot.
I won’t condescend to warn you about the gruesomeness you’re going to encounter in Knuckle Balled. If you’ve found your way here, I think it’s safe to say your taste in horror runs considerably left of center, and you’ve probably got a stomach to match. The same goes for profoundly disturbing content; it is, after all, a story about unspeakable abuse visited upon children. Most of that is kept off the page, but a few lines land like a kick in the teeth (as they should). Drew looks into the darkest corners you can imagine, and he doesn’t flinch.
And yet—you knew there was an “and yet,” right?—RJ’s story isn’t entirely one of degradation and despair. I’ll admit I’ve lost my taste for horror that doesn’t offer at least a few thin rays of hope and humor, and you’ll find both running through Knuckle Balled. RJ is no Lestat, but he’s no Rudy Pasko either. His novelty in the world of counterculture vampire fiction isn’t that he’s a remorseless, bloodthirsty killer, or that he’s a monster struggling to maintain some semblance of his humanity. It’s that he’s both.
~ April Snellings / Rue Morgue
Just ‘cause you got the monkey off your back doesn’t mean the circus has left town.
~ George Carlin
My name is RJ, and I’m a drug addict.
Like a shitty Nar-Anon meeting on some preachy episode of TJ Hooker, that’s the way my nightmare always began. My subconscious was forcing me into rehab to face the consequences of my choices. These choices—the ones that resulted in Bait’s death—ate away at my body from the tip of my toes all the way to the longest strand of hair sticking up on my head.
I’m a bad man. I’m a selfish man. Although I’m not technically a vampire, who’s to say that I’m not some form of vampire? By form of vampire I mean a Hail Mary abortion kept alive by a perverted Catholic sect called The Cloth who crossed their arms and shook their heads at my junkie mother’s right to choose.
The fact was this: I was alive. I needed blood… and heroin.
In the dream—which I’m not sure I can call a dream because I’m not technically certain I was asleep—I would find myself planted in the middle of a circle of plastic junior high-quality assembly chairs. The meeting didn’t take place in a junior high, however. It took place in the torched remains of the gymnasium where I was brought to life by way of an incubator, steroids, and a constant drip of narcotics. That was how the lovely cunts at St. Matthews fed me to instill my addiction.
I grabbed tightly onto the chair that seemed to be ass fucking me as I pinched my finger on a screw that was coming loose. It felt like the center of the seat contained a makeshift dildo fabricated from the same uncomfortable plastic utilitarian chair materials as the base.
I cleared my throat, making certain that everyone heard my plea for forgiveness.
Ahem. My name is RJ, and I’m a heroin addict.
Everyone in the circle around me just seemed angry. The dream cast always featured a filthy assortment of assholes and unfortunate collateral damage who had turned my walking abortion life upside down.
To my right was a dirty pig of a man in a Roman Catholic vestment masturbating into the face of a little boy in a sailor outfit as he chugged fetuses from a giant beer stein. To my left was a cracked-out slut who was birthing lifeless children from her gash, one right after another, strung together by umbilical cords as if she were processing macabre sausages.
My conscience had a funny way of grabbing a bullhorn and yelling into my ear, Hey, dickhead, you’re worse than every living and unlikable piece of shit in this room. Remember, this is the room where you were crapped out of your druggie mother’s ass. This is the room where you were sentenced to walk the earth as an unloving and uncaring shell of normality.
I pleaded for acceptance into their cult of sobriety. Still, no one responded. I wanted to be welcomed into their world of the living. Surely I wasn’t as bad as Father McAteer, who was located halfway around the circle, and was much more preoccupied with polishing and placing a diamond ring onto the skeletal finger of his latest victim. I mean, he brought me and all the other abortions in Los Angeles to life because he wanted to stop the mass prostitute abortions on the streets of L.A. That’s pretty bad.
Again.
My name is RJ, and I’m a heroin addict.
I tried to stand up and extract revenge on them for ignoring me. Who were they to sit and judge? I was better than all of them. I didn’t have a problem. Unlike them, I was forced to live like this. I didn’t ask for it. If I had my way, that piece of shit mother of mine would have shoved a vacuum up her twat and sucked me out before I fell into the care of McAteer and The Cloth.
How dare they look down their noses at me. Sure, I’ve killed several hundred humans, including half-vampire people. So what? And yeah, sometimes I killed people for the fun of it, but mostly I killed because I needed that sweet warm nectar in their bodies. I needed to stay alive… and get high. Killer or victim? Which one was I? After literally crawling out of a dumpster in my teens, the only way for me to stay alive was to feed my hunger.
My hunger… my everything… my loving heroin… the only love of my sad half-life.
The itches and sweats intensified as they continued to ignore me. I felt so debilitated in the dream that I vomited cotton balls, then tried to pound them back into my corroded mouth with my fist.
Ashamed.
I was ashamed of my existence. Not even those derelicts who sat on their high horses would get the chance to point and laugh at what was left of me. Broken into a thousand pieces of waste on the inside and filled to the brim with darkness, regret, and sadness. That was what was left of RJ Reynolds. Badass vampire, heroin addict, gangster motherfucker.
“I got your back,” a baritone whisper vibrated my ear drum.
I turned to see King Cobra standing next to me. His voice was warped by one of those awful steel collars that The Cloth used to control us when we were in captivity. It was just a week ago, but it felt like years. They forced us to eliminate all the other vampire gangs in L.A. I escaped the vise of the collar. Cobra didn’t.
I wanted to tell him how much he meant to me. He was the biggest threat to my drug dealing operation and I despised his fascist rule of the streets. Thing was, I never got the chance to enjoy the alliance we formed after we were kidnapped by The Cloth because—
“Adstringo gutter!” A voice screamed from the other side of me.
Because that happened.
The dream and the wish of getting the chance to spend more time with King Cobra left me as the collar tightened and squeezed the contents of his head out all over my shoulder.
I knew who spoke The Cloth’s magic phrase. It was The Habit: the awful teenybopper actress who had outlived her appeal, turned heroin addict and then nun mercenary for a pack of vampire exterminators.
She lifted her repulsive nun’s habit— “It’s a habit. Get it RJ?” —and started fingering herself. Small fetuses dropped to her filthy toes. “I know you want to get inside this shit.”
There might have been a time when I wanted to fuck her, but that was long ago. Mostly I wanted to keep off the streets by living in her heroin den. Now even that house was gone.
“Too bad none of you vampire scum can get a hard-on,” she reminded me.
That was the truth. A lot of us cheated the fact that we didn’t have enough blood in our bodies to get aroused by using a syringe full of blood and some crushed up Viagra.
She limped away into the dark, leaving a trail of unborn babies in her wake.
And then, just as I stood up and was about to grab an arm bong and my rig and leave those dreadful monsters, another familiar voice rang out like a news story sound bite from a murder scene.
“She’s dead, motherfucker. I kept her alive because I knew you’d be back. I wanted you to see me kill her, you piece of shit.”
I sat down and closed my eyelids. I didn’t want to look up and see who was sitting across from me in the circle of horrible creatures. I told myself it was only a stupid dream. But the voice fought louder than my attempts to reel myself back to reality. It spelled out my greatest failure. It reminded me of the worst thing that I had ever done that sat on top of a mountain of blood-drained corpses. The failure waved a flag from atop its mountain and insisted that there would never be a way to correct this wrong. It was beyond a lack of judgment. It was beyond taking the left path to damnation rather than the right one toward salvation. It could never be fixed and it could never be rewritten. It was worse than taking human life for pleasure.
With my head down, I sat there and debated whether or not to further confront the demons that I conjured up. For some reason, all I could think about was killing that lump of human feces to my right—the pedophile priest—and sucking what was left of his barren existence from his knuckles. After all, that was my justification for killing pimps, gangsters, child molesters, and the accumulated dirt on the streets of Los Angeles. Wasn’t it? They didn’t have any right to live.
A rat scurried by my bare feet. Rather than looking up and facing myself in a mirror of misery, I watched it circle around my legs in a figure eight. I refused to give any further attention to the pedophile or the welfare check assembly line on the other side of me. And I definitely didn’t want to catch a glimpse of the horror tragedy across the room from me that I had created. I snatched up the rat. Trying not to draw attention to myself, I rolled open my leather syringe case with my calloused heel. Using my big toe and broken and bent second toe, I clinched onto a needle’s plunger and pulled it out of the case. With my other foot, I exchanged direction. The toxin gleamed a strawberry milkshake color, a sign that it contained both heroin and blood. The vermin dug his fangs into the meeting point of my thumb and index finger. I flicked him in the face with my other hand. I didn’t want him dead before I bit into his hairy spine like a snack cake.
He released his teeth just as my left foot—accompanied by the vessel brimming with my eternal love—slid up my inner thigh. Slowly, I grabbed the syringe with my hand. The rat looked up at me with his dingleberry-sized eyes. He knew what was coming. He could see a cloud of death rolling into the decrepit assemblage taking place in the gymnasium that he called home. From the corner of my eye, I caught a peek of the yellow caution tape that guarded my birth secrets and the evidence that The Cloth had committed crimes in the eyes of their God. It reminded me that, like it was for that rat, this was my home.
Starving for a fix, I pulled back on the plunger and dragged my now wet tongue across my dehydrated and busted lips. The rat squirmed for a second. Then, he stopped, looked up at me and gave up.
From across the circle, I heard another familiar voice. It was the voice of my conscience ag
ain, only this time it had the tone of thirteen-year-old runaway and wannabe prostitute, Bailia Jenkins. Bait.
“Make me like you.” It was the voice of my failure. I finally looked up. “Bite my neck.” She pleaded with me. “You can make me live forever. You’re a vampire.”
I dropped the rat and the scag, looking away from her. As the lights dimmed in the room and the horde of wrongdoers—the NA equivalent of the Legion of Doom—collected their kids, their hatchets, their fetus-shooters, and slung bronzed baby shoes around their necks, I lifted my head again and saw the truth. My truth.
In front of me was a sneering Dez, lightly patting another me on the head as if I had just inched out a win at a spelling bee. I was the one who saved him from the streets when he was left at the dump by the fucking priests. And he repaid me by taking away the closest connection to humanity that I ever had, the cure for my loneliness and pain. In the arms of my duplicate, in my other mouth, and literally all over the other me was what was left of Bait. I didn’t know whether Dez killed Bait out of jealousy or if he, like almost all the creatures like us, was indifferent to the lives of humans.
It didn’t make sense to fully blame him for killing Bait. He may have tortured her and delivered the final blow, but I was just as much to blame for bringing her into my wreckage. If I could have bitten her neck and brought her back to life, I would have. The fact is, that was just romantic fiction, and no matter how many times I told her that I didn’t have any miraculous powers beyond my super strength, fast healing, and sensitive hearing, she refused to believe me.
For some reason, I stood up from my uncomfortable nightmare chair and walked across the circle to the welcoming arms of the traitor, Dez. I bent down in front of him and the other me. Then I shared in the feast of the thirteen-year-old girl who taught what it meant to feel alive.