by Drew Stepek
The buzzing of a prepaid cell phone that Eldritch picked up for me at a 7-Eleven woke me. It vibrated against my face and dusted up some pebbles on the balmy Texas asphalt where I guess I had passed out. We had spent a few days on the run, hiding out in abandoned buildings around the outskirts of Austin, and it was enough to force anyone into an alley for a nap. You’d never know when you’d find something comforting like a pissed-on throw pillow that lived a second life beyond the giveaway bin at the local Salvation Army.
I scrapped some eye boogers off my lashes and yawned. Coming off of half a week on “poor man”—Eldritch’s fun time concoction of Rottweiler blood, eighty percent meth and twenty percent heroin—was an unmatched spiral to the bottom of the heap. That is, of course, when the buzzing paranoia and face-picking turns the corner to exhaustion. I looked at the phone display.
Where are you?!?!?!?! Are you still on 6th? You’ve been in that alley for over an hour!!!!!!!!!!!
I’m not sure if I could see clearly enough to process all the exclamation and question marks at the end of his text. However, I was sure his intention was to convey a sense of urgency that he normally reserved for the editors who spew out his dick-suck-worthy acting reels and his crack team of antique furniture delivery men who couldn’t seem to get that unique, Eighteenth Century armoire to his ten-thou-a-month Bat Cave quickly enough.
Trying to keep my two-ton eyelids open long enough to grab the handset with my post-amphetamine shake fest jumping bean hands, I wrote back.
Fuck you. Taking a nap.
I scratched at the crown of my head; I came up with a handful of dead hair rather than relief. The phone buzzed again.
Good God, man. Need I remind you that for every hourglass grain that passes, constables are running Amber Alerts on television!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The over-use of exclamation on the second text made me dizzy. I propped myself up from my fetal meth position and sucked in the hot, polluted air of Austin. I tried to shake my eyes straight and the refuse in my hair loose. That was a mistake. Immediately, I found my head between my bent legs, hurling up the single-serve bag of Peperoni Pizza Combos that I swiped from a gas station during my ill-fated journey through the streets of this white-trash knockoff of Los Angeles. The only real difference between this asshole of a town and the cesspool of my formative years is hipster, indie ball-licking music taking center stage in front of the washed-up whores-turned-DJs that I had become accustomed to. Oh, and of course the fact that street people in Austin were lowered to wearing the secondhand fashion statements of two years ago that the Lost Angel pricks delivered as care packages to brighten the hopes of the excrement that filled the streets of South by Southwest.
I had been so totally out of it since we left California—stopping only in Peoria, Arizona to take care of some business involving a child molester and his accepting wife—that I didn’t really have time to pull myself through the pain of downtown Shitville. To Austin’s credit, it was a lot like Silverlake and Los Feliz. The same D-bags exchanged their cardigan sweaters for knit caps and ironic Donkey Kong wristbands. As if my confessional nightmare wasn’t crummy enough, it was followed by waking up in the center of an aiming-low star fucker nirvana.
Playing to my predicament, I tried to get all the speedy, rancid bile out of my stomach. Luckily for me, the delicious pretzel outer shell of the Combos provided my tongue with flavor and my throat with buffer.
A hand tugged on my shoulder.
“Hey, friend. You okay?”
I picked out a piece of Combo stuck between my teeth with my tongue and spit it onto his custom, limited edition Adidas. That was when I noticed his shirt. It said “Funky Cold Medina”.
“Really, dude?” I blurted out like a fortified wine-drenched vagrant. “’Funky Cold Medina’? That’s the best you could do?”
“Whatever, you piece of shit,” he said as he threw a handful of loose change in my face.
The phone buzzed again, causing it to shake off my knee and onto the ground. I picked it up as my vision crossed planes between blurry and borderline dyslexia-like symptoms. Before I took the time to focus on the new message, I realized why Eldritch was quiet for a few moments. It wasn’t because he wanted me to collect my thoughts or get my shit together. Rather, he wanted to produce a manifesto detailing our situation in flowery Shakespearian dialect.
I closed my left eye because it was agitated by the LED-lit display and held the phone in path with a street light. As if that made any sense or resulted in any difference whatsoever. It read:
No response? That is what could be expected from a shrewd individual of your character. As the sun creeps up on us such as the plague of our fathers, you have simply forgotten the situation you have delivered onto us. My trusted carriage…
I think he was taking about his retarded hearse…
…is the suspected kidnappers and killers’ transportation. If you cannot commandeer a more formidable mode of transportation, then I must no longer participate in your folly of misguided and dangerous actions. Simply stated, I will be leaving you to your own devices and dropping off the child at the nearest constable house. In an agreement we made, you promised full participation in helping to veil us from those who find us the despicable demons who took the lives of an innocent suburban couple and abducted their sole living offspring. Am I incorrect to expect your aid? Please advise on your progress and respond with due diligence. Regretfully, if your complete participation in this matter is met with tom foolery, then I am out of—
His fancy pants words strung together as a blob of nonsense, but it was all too obvious that he was preoccupied with the kid to finish his text, to which I replied:
Don’t end a sentence with a preposition. Bad English.
One. Two. Three.
Just get the fucking car, RJ.
I hadn’t really seized the opportunity to laugh at myself in recent weeks, so I took a second, licked the barf off the back of my teeth and giggle a little. I slid my drained body up a brick wall and typed.
On it.
Eldritch was right about one thing. The night was coming to end. As SXSW scenesters started stumbling out of their new favorite clubs where they discovered their new favorite bands, I inched along the sidewalks, being bounced around like a racquetball by drunken, coked-out corduroy.
My path drove me further and further from the action. I needed to find a less conspicuous vehicle than the overwhelming lot of refurbished rockabilly posers’ classic Ford pickup trucks and roadsters that lined the afterhours parking spots on 6th Street. Beyond that, I needed to find something more practical for two people essentially allergic to sunlight and a pre-teen girl, who, unfortunately, needed to be tied up and gagged.
Kind of a funny thing about me saving Bait’s little sister, Pinball, from the atrocities of the doublewide where she grew up is that she only understood what she saw. Acting on nothing but vengeance for her sister, I didn’t make a good first impression on her. As a matter of fact, our introduction was the ripping apart of her stepfather and mother. In other words, I was the monster who killed her loving parents and took her away from her life.
You can never know how a child interprets abuse. Maybe my victims, Thomas the child rapist and his glutton of a wife, told her they did what they did out of love. It was either that or she simply couldn’t differentiate between having a middle-aged man’s testicles in her mouth and getting a loving hug for doing well in school. So, if me being a monster in the eyes of a child for the time being meant that Pinball didn’t end up as burnt pieces in the remains of a meth lab in the Salton Sea like her sister… then so be it.
Despite my recommendation to leave her in Peoria, Eldritch insisted that we take her with us. I don’t know why. The last thing that I wanted was another kid to worry about and take care of.
My knees popped as I stopped at the window of an electronics store and took a good look at myself.
“I don’t think I know you,” I said to my reflection.
My bushy mess of a hairdo shot out sideways, overgrown at my ears. It was still kind of blonde, but all of the blood and dirt that clumped onto it since I last showered at Eldritch’s loft in Los Angeles just made it look like someone sprayed shit on my head every morning. Even worse, the hair acted as lights leading into a landing strip that drew all attention to the drooping and bagged craters that contained my eyes. The eyes were sometimes blue and sometimes green. Rarely did others get the opportunity to gaze into my peepers—my best quality—because my pupils were constantly dilated. So, if I ever had to describe myself to anyone, I would play it safe and say I had black and red eyes. The older I got, the more my cheekbones tended to push at the bags. It was a constant fight between what seemed to be living material and the death spreading across the center of my face.
I dug around the edges of my nose with my index finger and my thumb. My large nostrils were so dry that the flakey skin created a path of irritation right into the top of my lips, which seemed to have a constant cut near the middle of the top. I curled my lip and threw my arms over my head, doing my best imitation of Billy Idol. I quietly wailed like Billy but came up embarrassingly short; my “Rebel Yell” was more of a “Careless Whisper”. My boney arms dropped to my sides and I slapped on my atrophy-mutated belly. The drugs tore down our bodies but combined with blood, they helped us live. The body was just a shell in a constant state of hyperkinetic rejuvenation. Unfortunately, my organs didn’t self-build muscle, but they never stopped layering bandages on top of bandages.
I bent over to a puddle by my feet, wiped the sewage across my face and the stood up again to look at the piece of shit that stared back at me. The water was refreshing but did little to mask my junkie features. At that point in my life as a career degenerate, I could dip my face in paint and make cool Misfits’ shirts. I dragged my tongue across the roof of my mouth that was coated with yuck mouth plaque. I licked some scum water off my cheek and tried to swoosh it around. I guessed my breath was always shit.
I stuck out my tongue. It was bumpy and blue as if it was the first thing that a couple of wisecracking TV detectives noticed after I had been fished out of the wharf. It matched the color of various unseen parts of my body, like my armpits or the raw area on the insides of my thighs around my balls.
I slapped on the stomach a few times and then spit out the sludge I used as mouthwash. Then, I stretched my neck closer to the electronics store and smiled into the window. My teeth were fucked up. The naturally crooked, street-cultivated ivories struggled to stay attached to the root. The years of drugs had browned each of them around the gum line and cracked them around the rim in back. If I licked my teeth, I could feel the broken-down damage and poverty of being a gross addict. On top of that, I was a grinder when I slept. So, the irony of being a vampire with teeth that could barely break down a piece of steak was never lost on me. It was my reality, and it wasn’t like I could swing by a dentist’s office, even if I had the money or insurance to do so.
I bobbed my head back and forth and lifted up my ratty t-shirt as I started dragging my hand up my torso. My fingers wobbled in and out of my ribs that stuck out in weird places. I did have the power to heal but nothing ever grew back perfectly. Wherever there was a break at some point in my life, there were little balls that ranged in size from BBs to golf balls. Like I said before, my body was comprised of bandages layered over bandages. If something broke, it would tie itself off like a water balloon or sprinkle a little glob of superglue onto the fracture. My body never finished the job by sanding over protrusions so jagged edges and bumps were common.
I knew my body was torn up, but I had no noticeable scars. The only plus of being a vampire—or an aborto-fiend—was the healing part. The sensitive hearing was kind of useless. The super strength was cool, but it wasn’t like any of us used our powers for good. As a whole, at least judging from the things like me that I had met, we were pretty much a society of psychotic boobs.
It had been a long time since I looked at myself, so I pulled my shirt over my head and inched even closer to the window to see if I could catch a glimpse at any remaining ink from my Faction Batman tattoo. It was eroded off of my chest by acid when I was kidnapped by those awesome Catholic priests that always seemed to guest star in my nightmares. No dots of ink or even a scar remained. I rubbed at the section where it used to be over my heart, maybe hoping that some skin was covering it up. Stupid, really. According to Cobra, The Cloth did me a favor by removing it from my body. At the very least, no more Batman or vampire/bat jokes for the rest of my life. I certainly wasn’t going to replace it. All that said, being semi-bulletproof didn’t beat being covered in a bunch of scars. The scars on the inside hurt worse and didn’t look as cool.
I pulled my shirt back down and tried to pull myself out of my hypnosis by hopping up and down a few times. My actions caused my dick to jump in my saggy jeans. I didn’t have a huge penis, but it was bigger than a lot of the dicks that I had ripped off of other dudes. I was so blessed. My soft dick was bigger than a bunch of guys who knew that they were about to be killed. Nothing gives a man a hard-on more than knowing that he is seconds away from not breathing. I rolled my eyes as I flicked the front of my jeans. What a useless apparatus. We couldn’t get a fucking boner unless we shot ourselves up with Viagra and blood. Most of us couldn’t have kids—as if we’d ever want that—and it still hurt to get punched in the balls. The Cloth should have done us all a favor and just hacked our cocks off. It probably would have made us a more streamlined army of insects. I never got to ask Father McAteer why The Cloth decided to circumcise us rather than going all in. It must have been the natural secondary process after they sterilized us and preparation process before discarding us in dumpsters.
All that time studying my broken body in the electronics shop’s window came to a halt when I noticed a news flash come on a TV in front of me. It was about this dude Eldritch was in love with named Stephan Rodderick. He was the star of a popular kiddie vampire movie series called The Nightshayde Chronicles. As we heard days earlier, on our way to Peoria, he OD’d on heroin but didn’t die. Eldritch assured me that he was one of us: a vampire.
I watched closely as they displayed his headshot on one side and showed clips from the melodramatic turds that little girls called cinema. My eyes shifted focus back to my reflection. If they only knew what vampires really looked like. I doubted that he was one of us. His teeth, his eyes, his cheekbones, his hair, and his body were all too perfect.
As I fixated on his perfection, anger grew inside of me. If he was a ghoul like me, why the fuck did he have it so good?
A flash of light bounced off the window, blinding me.
“What the fuck?” I yelled as I covered me eyes.
I spun away from the window to see a blurred figure taking a picture of me with his phone. It was my “Funky Cold Medina” friend from the alley.
“Hey asshole,” I said. “Why are you following me?”
He didn’t respond. Rather, he touched the screen on his phone, threw it into his backpack and started running away.
I hobbled along after him, calling out, “Are you with The Cloth? Who the fuck are you? Why are you taking pictures of me?”
FoLLow hiM. HE has hEroin.
Dammit. “The Gooch” again. It had started while Cobra and me were imprisoned by Fat Mac and The Cloth. They had used methadone to curb my heroin cravings. It was the voice that whispered in my ear, tugged on my arms, and ripped at my scalp. The Gooch never invaded my heinous dreams. It just came out when I was feeling alone. Feeling hungry.
So in addition to finding a replacement car so we could ditch Eldritch’s hearse, my other mission was to find heroin. The simple truth was, scag shut The Gooch up and I didn’t like being reminded what a stain on the world I had been since I was brought to life. So, I followed the Medina guy because I wanted to be alone in my head.
I tried to track the Medina dude as I scraped my toes against the concrete, making it further from the dimmi
ng lights of last call in downtown Austin. I knew that the closer I got into the world of scrap heaps, pawn shops and tow yards, the closer I got to securing a less conspicuous vehicle. In Eldritch’s defense, he didn’t know that following me into the war to save Bait would result in us making our way to Austin. However, I couldn’t excuse him from spinning around in a hearse with a chrome Platinum Motorsports customization emblem on the gate, emphasized by a license plate that read NSFRATU. The lengths that guy went to were painful. We might as well have run over a reporter covering the death of Bait and Pinball’s gross parents in a Wonder Bread truck and whipped out our dicks for the camera man. But hey, it’s all hindsight, right? When I originally went to save Bait, I had no idea I would end up in Peoria and then Austin, either. He said he had a plan and he saved my ass several times. It was dumb to kidnap the kid, but I owed him.
The streets got darker as the businesses became sparser and more beaten down. Medina had long since disappeared beyond the shadows of the buildings in front of me.
My phone buzzed in my back pocket.
I shook my head, pulled it out and turned it on.
Please tell me you found a vehicle, RJ.
And just like that, I had forgotten about the dumbass Medina taking a picture of me altogether.
I looked up from the phone without responding and, as luck would I have it, in the economic urinal of Austin, I saw a car lot. Well, it wasn’t exactly a car lot per se. It was more of an animal shelter. At the moment though, it seemed to provide the perfect solution to my dilemma. I could steal a dog catcher truck. Eldritch and I could roll in the front and we could put the kid in a cage in the back. The police would never suspect a dog catcher mobile in Austin to answer for the murders of two scumbags in Peoria.
I shook off the spins and looked up the chain-link security fence until my eyes reached the razor wire that rolled ominously across the top. Although I didn’t quite understand why such security measures were in place for a building that housed mange-infected pets that nobody wanted except for some hippie giving their dumb kid a first taste of responsibility, I figured scaling it would be a piece of cake.