by Drew Stepek
I unfastened my seatbelt and lifted myself through the passenger-side window above. “Please don’t go off,” I begged the airbag. I coughed a bit and counted to five to make sure that all the pieces were in play for the big reveal. I decided that I would end the scene with an incredibly astute statement like, “Need a ride? You might want to clean yourselves up first.”
I fully lifted myself from the truck and turned to face them. But it was too dark outside and since they were no longer in front of the fire, I had a difficult time making out whether or not they were blanketed in dust. I adjusted my sight. They didn’t move. I cleared my throat. They remained still. I waited another second or two. It might have been a minute or two. I couldn’t really gage time lapsing because the entire world was spinning and dissolving around me still from the PCP.
I cleared my throat yet again. Eldritch took a step toward me. Pinball hid behind his leg.
He cranked his head to the side as if he was disorientated, a good sign he’d been sandblasted.
I rubbed off some blood from my right ear and ate it. “You guys need a ride?”
I winked but they stood silent. I jumped to the ground and lifted my hands over my head briefly, to suck in more air, their lack of expression was killing me. I breathed too hard though, vomiting bile all over myself. I doubled over from the smell and was reminded that not only was I not wearing pants, but I had shit all over myself in the truck. I wiped my forearm on my ass cheek to make sure I remembered the soiling correctly. I had.
Amazingly, I caught Pinball’s eyes as she peered out behind Eldritch’s legs. She was crying.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t the type of crying that I was expecting. In my mind, her crying was expected to be akin to a conquered grown man. I was fully expecting something along the lines of Junior in Smokey and the Bandit. Nope. Her crying was the result of witnessing absolute horror, then feeling absolute terror.
I looked down at my body. My left arm was dangling. My chest was caved in so badly that I could see a crater in my sternum. Both of my legs were completely shredded from the razor wire that surrounded the animal control lot. I bent down and tore off the passenger side mirror and took a closer look. Blood was gushing out from every open hole in my face. I looked worse than most of my Chaplin victims back at their theater.
Eldritch let Pinball go from the protection of his leg. She darted forward then veered off toward the barn. He remained quiet and lowered his head. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that he was more disappointed than terrified by everything that had gone down. He wasn’t ever easy to scare, but his inability to say anything spoke volumes.
Pinball unlatched the decaying barn door and slipped inside. Nausea washed over me and I collapsed under my own weight. I puked again. I guess I was actually poisoned by all the PCP in my system. When I finally managed to get to a relative stable stance, I began to shuffle and drag myself toward the barn.
“RJ! No!” Eldritch shouted.
I got close enough to him to realize that he wasn’t covered in dust or sand or anything dirty whatsoever.
“Let me handle this, please,” I said.
I grabbed onto the door latch, closed one eye in an attempt to focus and stretch myself back to full height. My bones, which were only partially broken, cracked and shattered inside my stumbling carcass. My body was drowning in its blood, which was pushing me into shock. Unluckily for me, the power of lethal dose of amphetamines inside my body was like dumping recycled water over my head, waking me up.
I heard Pinball whimpering under Eldritch’s hearse. He’d parked it in the barn because even though we were nowhere near the street, someone in Peoria likely spotted it and the cops were on the lookout. It’s not a stretch to say that you could see it from the moon.
I lugged myself closer to her. “It’s okay. I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you. It’s just me, RJ. Remember?
I went on. “It’s me, the friendly vampire guy.” My right kneecap cracked and I dropped down to one leg. I could hear her, but with my senses booming different signals from all directions, I felt like the compass in my head was gyrating all over the place. Add the pulsating visuals of the PCP and I might as well have been Snow White in a wheelchair trying to escape an evil batch of forest creatures out for revenge.
I heard a scuttle to my right and my head snapped toward it.
“It’s okay. I’m the good guy who saved you.”
Scurrying out from under the hearse, she plowed past me again. As quick as I could, I reached back behind me to catch her, only to rip out a strand of her hair. I fell onto my back and smacked my head on the corroded bumper of the dead car as her entire head of hair flew into my face.
“Jesus!” I screamed, thinking I’d ripped her entire head off her body. Stunned, I threw the hair ball on the hay on the ground trying to shake it off me like a spider. It certainly didn’t feel heavy enough to contain a head. With my eyes squinted, I picked it back up and surveyed it. I turned it over, hoping not to see Pinball’s mangled scalp inside. Instead, I saw a tag. A tag from a wig.
Completely perplexed, I looked over to see the dome of Pinball’s bald head behind Eldritch’s legs.
As he petted her hairless head behind him, he breathed, “She has leukemia.”
And then, everything went black… including my ugly soul.
I rubbed my forehead. It was drenched. “How long have I been out?”
Eldritch handed me a rag to wipe my head. “You have only been unconscious for about—” he looked at the face of his phone, “—two hours. Now, however, I am the one who is exhausted.”
“Two hours?” I threw the rag back at him. “That’s nothing.”
He looked up from the hay beneath his legs. He was sitting Indian-style on the floor of the barn. “You have been out for two hours.” He snapped a small twig between his fingers. “I have been subduing you for two long days and nights.”
“What do you mean?”
He picked up the rag again, folded it, and delicately placed it in my lap. “I mean you had ingested such an elevated-level of angel dust—among other things—that you needed to be restrained throughout much of your two-day flight through the world of insanity.” He pointed at the rag and then dragged his finger across his right eye. “What in the name of Odin happened to you?”
I took his signal and wiped my left eye, tucking the Odin comment into the back of what remained of my pulverized brain for use at a later time. “Let’s see…” My body felt undone and bent like I imagined it would after freaking the fuck out for two days after fighting a gang of vampires and getting in a horrible self-inflicted car accident. The more I tried to remember what happened, the more I felt the stinging of a migraine.
“Hmmmm. Well, I remember texting with you when my heart finally stopped trying to escape from my chest as I was coming come down off the poor man shit you fed me. Then, I almost beat the dick off this stupid hipster cunt wearing a ‘Funky Cold Medina’ shirt. He was taking pictures of me so I followed him.” I threw the rag back to him again.
Eldritch cleared his throat and grabbed me by the chin with his palm. He stretched one of his metal talon fingers up to my forehead and with the rag, he wiped my face. “Please don’t ever sing that melody again. Nothing beyond that chorus has blown from your lips for the past two days. I believe Paulina…” He stopped rubbing my face.
“Paulina?”
“The female youth. The one you call Pinball. Paulina.”
I propped myself up onto my elbows and looked around the barn. “Where is she?”
“Not to worry. She is outside by the fire. I barred her from any further exposure to this madness.” Eldritch yanked a cigarette out of his pouch and cut a small slit in his tongue with his metal finger. A small bubble of blood gurgled on top. He licked the end of his cigarette and snapped his fingers to produce fire as theatrically as always. He lit it and sucked down a huge barrel of smoke that he then blew toward me. I felt the thick sting of cloves i
nvade every unhealed scrape on my face. The sores tensed up and rejected the hideous exhaust. I would never forget that atrociously sweet smell multiplying and potentially further damaging my lifeless body.
I rolled my head back to try and avoid it. “Come on, you dick. If you’re going to smoke those pussy, goth cigarettes, please don’t blow the smoke in my face.”
He ashed the cig. “Cloves are a natural antioxidant.”
I lofted the smoke back at him. “Not when you smoke them. Aren’t they used to get rid of moths?”
He blew another drag in my face. “I think you’re confusing them with mothballs. I believe the smoke will accelerate your healing process. I have never seen anyone that forspillan.”
I spit out a big chuck of flesh that was hanging from my gums. “Forspillan?”
“I believe you would call it ‘wasted’.”
“Whatever, Eldritch, like you’ve never been fucking wasted.”
He gripped my chin again, tighter this time, and dragged the talon from my forehead to directly above my left eye. “There is no whatever. What happened next?”
I saw the campfire outside the barn reflecting through holes in the rotted wood. “Let’s see. I made my way out of downtown Austin.” The migraine continued to bite at my head. “And then I found us a car. The truck.”
The tip of his metal blade dug into my eyebrow. “That would be the constable truck for animal authority.”
I took him by the wrist and slowly pulled his fingers away from my face. “I think it’s called a dog catcher truck, but yeah, I figured we’d tie Pinball up and throw her in one of the cages or something.”
“The lass’s name is Paulina Jenkins.”
His unsteady hand began to shake and move back toward my face.
“Godammit, Eldritch. I think there’s a fucking hole in my face, asshole. It’s isn’t a blood smear or fucking chocolate.”
His talons folded into his lap like a peacock fanning its feathers as he calmly said, “The hole in your face rejuvenated two days ago. However, you may continue your story.”
“Thank you. So, I was climbing this fence to get into the dog pound and I was completely fucked up… lack of blood, still tweaking my brain out. Well, I managed to get my legs tangled up in this gnarly razor wire. Then, I got jumped by a gang. A fucking vampire gang, dude. Did you know there were vamps here? Did you know there were girl vamps?”
“Which gang?”
“Are you kidding me? Is there more than one? How the hell did they know I was one of them? I’m sure they wouldn’t have brought out their full arsenal of silent movie shitbags if they thought I was some drunk dildo who stumbled away from South by Southwest. I followed that guy who was taking pictures of me there. He was the leader of the gang.” Blood started to dribble from the hole in my cheek.
He nodded. “They call themselves the Chaplins. Just so you are aware, there are many more supernatural beings in Austin than in Los Angeles.”
“What? You’re killing me. Answer the question. How did they know I was a vamp? Why was he taking pictures of me?” I swabbed at the hole like my finger was a Q-tip.
Eldritch swatted my hand away. “They must have put the Amber Alert and our arrival together.” Then, he shoved the rag back into the hole. “The rag is clean.”
I held the rag on my cheek. “That doesn’t make any sense.”
Eldritch nodded his head, approving that I finally decided to use the rag. “Did you speak with anyone while within Austin City Limits?” He smirked.
“I bet you’re real proud of yourself with that one, huh, dick? I told you I spoke to that fucker in the ‘Funky Cold Median’ shirt. About fifteen minutes later, he was behind me taking pictures of me. Then, I followed him. Then, I was attacked. I didn’t know he was a vampire.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Didn’t you?”
His voice electrified my headache. “I don’t know, shithead. No.”
“Are you sure you didn’t know?”
I threw the rag back at him. “Jesus fucking Christ. I thought he was some pervert.”
He looked down at the now disgusting ruby towel in his lap and whispered, “The one thing that I do know is that the Chaplins only dress theatrically for combat. I was very good friends with them. Unfortunate. Maybe, this Funky Cold Median you spoke of is a new recruit. You once told me that you can smell other in-humans. I believe I can as well. It would not be outside the realm of possibility.”
“The only thing I smell right now is your patchouli and it’s making me want to barf.”
He ignored the comment. “Could you smell them?”
I ran my nose across my arm. “I smelled like vomit and Combos. Now, I smell like vomit, Combos, and B.O. meets diarrhea casserole. Do you think you could have hosed me the fuck down while I was losing my mind for two days?”
“Alas, we are in the moisture-less desert, RJ.”
I felt the drip start again. I snatched the rag out of his lap. “So, yeah. Maybe I followed this guy back there unconsciously because I suspected that he was a vampire. It doesn’t matter; even if he led me back there to his dress-up buddies in makeup and suits, I still smeared those assholes all over the pavement. I was like a super fighter. I was like an evil superhero cage fighter or something.”
I would have told Eldritch that The Gooch instructed me to follow the guy, but that would have opened up another can of worms, and I didn’t feel like breaking that seal. If he learned of me hearing voices that drove me to heroin, more than likely it would lead to him trying to exorcise it out of me using some Wiccan ceremony.
Eldritch brushed a piece of hay off of his mesh tank top. “Judging from your condition over the past two days, I am going to speculate that you are delusional. Scratch that: either you are delusional now or you were hallucinating heavily when you faced these veiled foes. For God’s sake—”
“Don’t you mean ‘Odin’s sake’?” The corners of my mouth curled up, revealing my teeth.
Before I got the chance to laugh, the flat end of his hand collided with my face. “I should have let you perish. What kind of man are you to consider putting a child in a cage? A child who recently witnessed the slaying of her parents at your hands? A child recovering from a malignant form of cancer?”
I polished the bridge of my nose as I shoved his hand away from me. “What do you mean cancer?” I then remembered the unpleasantness of the barn and the wig. “Oh.”
“Yes, RJ. The child is recovering from leukemia.”
I never claimed to know anything about regular people diseases. And even though these sicknesses never really affected my kind, I do know the words cancer and AIDS equate to bad and death. “How bad is it?” I asked.
“Children’s leukemia is never a good thing. However, to answer your boorish question, she has been in remission for over a year. It seems she is much stronger than she looks. From what she has shared with me, her parents shaved her head purposely to garner attention from their community.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“I am not.” He rubbed his finger across his leg. “I find her inability to comprehend the magnitude of her ailment concerning.”
“Meaning?”
“She understands that her hair fell out from the medication and treatment and she partially understands that she is sick. I do not, however, believe she understands the disease or what could happen if she neglects it. I am suspicious that her guardians failed to explain it to her, and I am sure that she understood very little of what the doctors explained to her.” He rubbed my face jizz off his palm. “It is our duty to escort her somewhere free from danger. That somewhere will be without you.”
“Why? And why just me? You’re twice as dangerous as I have ever been.”
He proudly swung his black hair out of his face. “Thank you.”
“It’s not a compliment, you vagina. We saved her from them. Those filthy fuckers raped her. We saved her from people who think it’s okay to rape children with cancer. I seriously
cannot in my wildest dreams think of anything worse than that.”
He opened his mouth to fire back, then closed it and huffed from his nose.
“Do you know why Bait called her Pinball, Eldritch?”
He shook his head.
“They called her Pinball because that pedophile of a stepfather of hers made a game out of pinning her down and making her lick his nuts while her mother watched and laughed.”
“She’s terrified of you, RJ.”
I clasped my hands together, the cliché for begging. “Please let me speak with her. I need to make her understand. I did it because I promised her sister I would.”
“But you slew her parents and seized her as if she was your property.”
“Step back, asshole,” I grunted. “You’re the one who said we should take her. I wanted to leave her there.”
He shook his finger at me. “We could not leave her there.”
“I don’t know if I agree with you or not, but I didn’t take her. That was all you, Eldritch.”
“As far as she believes, you killed her sibling as well. Shall I also remind you that you attempted to devastate us in a truck while screaming nonsense and drenched in blood. You took off your britches and your frame was scantily held together by strings.”
Was it possible that unlike her sister, Pinball was afraid of me? Was she afraid of vampires or whatever undead drug abortion we were? I needed to make this right. If not solely for me and my conscious and my haunting dreams, then I had to make it right for Bait.
“Okay, Eldritch,” I finally agreed. “What do you propose?”
“The most difficult part will be you speaking with her and attempting to make her understand why we removed her from her home.”
“Sounds easy enough,” I said, remembering my long talks with Bait. As far as I knew, I was great with kids.
“It will not be. She is not her sibling. She is not the hardened soul you kept so close to your side. Whether or not we believe maiming her parents for the injustices they committed was honorable, they are all she has ever known. Her father having carnal knowledge of her and the reality of her declining health are two things she only understands in part because that is all there ever was for her. From what I have pieced together, she understood fornication with her father as a gift of love and the disease as her punishment for her not loving him back enough.” Eldritch’s voice was sorrowful and his eyes twitched. For some reason, he related to the girl. She was a familiar pain to him.