by Drew Stepek
I imagined that the McRoaches would be defeated on the edge of the building, swearing at each about who was to blame for my dashing escape, but I was wrong. The BMX bandit and another hurled themselves off the building like lemmings.
I tried to kick up dirt and get out of there when the bandit dropped onto my ankle, tripping me. He crept up my back. The feeling of this insect touching me caused goose flesh on my arms. I flipped him over my back, mashed his face into the gravel, and plunged my bloody knee into his chest. Quickly, I unscrewed his head, completely demolishing his neck. The head rolled sideways like he was made of rubber as his body squirted out one last shot of diarrhea.
“Get outta here! Now!” one of the McCoys screeched from the roof. I figured they were spooked by my amazing feat of strength until an intense melody of automatic gunfire erupted. The few McCoys who were on my tail stopped in their tracks and looked back to the symphony of their brothers being annihilated. The McRoaches were no longer interested in me, so I started running. Without warning, the entire pharmacy went up with a huge explosion, vaulting flaming figures off of the roof.
As I reached the far tree line behind the demolished store, I turned around one more time to see the living zombies who followed me off the roof gunned down by a legion of assassins in cowboy hats. I jumped through the foliage as I grabbed the Oxy from my ass crack and shook it like a maraca.
“Fan out, y’all. There are more around here,” one of the exterminators screamed into a bullhorn.
It’s a cliché.
Like many times before, I was a vampire racing against the clock to beat my pending doom at the hands of the blazing sun. Rather than stick around to be mutilated, or worse, captured by the Minutemen like the McCoys, I just ran, desperate for refuge. These clichéd tropes reminded me that time was up at dawn. I wouldn’t burst into flames or anything, but it would hurt and I had already managed to destroy my nose and scrape most of the flesh off my knees.
I was sure that Austin hadn’t wised up to the tags that we painted on safe houses around L.A. But since the last time I went into one of those places I ended up sucking some hook-handed psycho’s cock, I figured maybe that was for the best. We aren’t charitable or helpful beings. Finding a place to duck out was much more difficult than you would imagine as cities don’t offer homeless people many options to come in from the cold, the rain, the snow, or—as in my case—the sun.
I managed to make my way to a subdivision just outside of downtown Austin called Allendale. It was a straight shot from the world’s nicest hood on the east side of Austin. As if I even knew when sunrise was, I looked at my burner phone. Luckily, I was able to hang onto it while being hunted by the McCoys. The goose flesh still hasn’t faded from my body ,even though that first beam of light was peeking through the openings between the buildings downtown and making me sweat.
I swung my head back and forth as I ran down a cul-de-sac. I didn’t want to invade someone’s home because I was too exhausted to kill anyone, and knowing my shit luck, I would have broken into some yokel’s kiddie porn studio and end up with a face full of assault rifle. Hiding in a garage was never a great idea, either. It was only a few hours away from the daily work grind. The last thing I wanted—besides sucking on the barrel of a pedophile’s gun—would be to fall asleep in the bed of some good ol’ boy’s pickup so he could parade me around town, directly into the sunlight. I figured I was being honest with myself, and at the risk of making wild generalizations of Texans, I had no interest in testing the limits of southern hospitality to a smelly junky.
I reached the end of the dead end and saw around fifteen similar houses with multiple acres each and relatively long driveways. As I tried to rub the fatigue off my face, I began playing eeny, meeny, miny, moe. All the houses looked the same, so it was beginning to look like a crap shoot for which suburban house was to be my shelter. As I opened my eyes to see the morning’s red clouds beyond the tree line, I spotted a bumper sticker on a pickup truck. It read, MY KID SELLS DRUGS TO YOUR HONOR STUDENT.
BinGo. I bEt they hAve hEroin.
“Nirvana,” I whispered to myself.
In the yard, backed into a tree line, I saw several trailers. On one a blue tarp looked to be covering two jet skis, and I deducted that since it was a weekday, no one would be going to the lake to shred. At least I hoped.
As a ray of light grazed my mutilated nasal cavity, I picked up the pace and hopscotched to the front yard of the house undetected.
I heard a garage door opening next door. “See y’all later,” someone yelled.
I lost my balance a little and hit the ground hard, knees first.
“Fuck me.”
The drying blood worked as an adhesive and tore away from the denim, taking with it the knee skin that had already healed. Not wanting to stand back upright, I started crawling across the yard toward the trailer. With every knee step, I felt pebbles and twigs piercing the wounds in the middle of my legs, especially the right one. When I reached the plastic, blue oasis, I peeped underneath. As I thought, under the tarp were two rednecked-out neon green Kawasaki water cycles. One of them had a separate, fitted cover, which I immediately decided would be used to wrap around my face if the tarp didn’t do a good enough job sheltering me. Between the two jet skis, there was this nice little area where I could stretch out and hopefully get some sleep while I waited out the daylight. It all seemed like an adequate hotel where I could lay low for the day.
I tried to cover my nose with my hand as I rolled my head around and then slid into the gap sideways. Shockingly the owners left a puffy life jacket on the trailer as well. Sure, it smelled like mold and it was nowhere near as comfortable as a pillow but, hey, things were going my way for once. As I tossed around in the gap, I remembered Pinball and Eldritch launching off the drug store roof and hoped that they found shelter as well.
I patted my nose to see if the flesh was starting to come back together and then said, “Oh, fuck him.” I didn’t even know if Eldritch had an aversion to the sun that wasn’t self-diagnosed. Stupid vampire. All of us are so lame. Not even really alive. Created in a lab. Abortions. My real concern should have been whether or not the Minutemen gunned his ass down and captured Pinball. I couldn’t even imagine what kind of lab they used to create cretins like the McCoys in. The best thing for everyone seemed to be to get that Sunshine disease off the streets before it crossed over into Austin hipster scene and started being mass produced in the Texas toilet: Mexico.
I untied the jet ski cover, ripped open a small breathing hole, wrapping it around my face. It felt weird on my fucked-up nose but the tarp seemed to be thick enough to protect me from the sun when I needed it. I took it off and rested my head on the life jacket. The tweets of birds bringing Austin to life became relaxing and I quickly dozed off. I had hoped to get twelve to fourteen hours of much deserved sleep.
I was awakened about an hour or two later when the occupants of the house started carrying on about some bullshit.
“We got a big weekend drop, bro,” one said in a thick southern accent.
The other snorted. “You know it, bro.”
I heard two hands high five. “Text me when you get done with work.”
“Awwwwww yeah, bro. I can’t even believe I have to work today.”
Second high five. Maybe, just maybe, the douchebags in Texas were the same as douchebags everywhere else in the world.
A hand leaned against the tarp, resting on the back of one of the jet ski seats. “What did you do with that babe?” he asked.
I felt my nose and rolled my eyes. It was pretty close to a full heal. Too bad I had been stricken with a brutal headache all of a sudden.
The other chuckled as he leaned on the other side of the tarp, on to the other back of the other jet ski seat. “Dumped her ass by the interstate.” Seriously. They must have been standing close to each other in the exact same stance.
“No shit?”
“Nah. I got her a cab at like three. Kissed her on the
cheek.”
“Did you fuck her?”
The other dude inhaled and took his resting hand off the tarp. “Fuckin’ A right.”
The other bro’s hand left the tarp and the final high five followed. Chivalry. High fives. Possible fist bumps. These are all my favorite ingredients when screening potential friends.
I looked at the clock on my phone. I still had no signal and I realized that these two baboons had just wasted three minutes of my super hearing. Wrapping things up, I imagined them throwing up a couple of shakas and saying taste a couple of times before slamming themselves into their pickups and leaving for work.
On my phone display, there was a notification that I had a text from Eldritch. It said:
Battery drained. Safe.
I responded:
Safe. Need sleep. Charge phone.
I pushed send even though I couldn’t get a signal.
The good news was that they averted any conflict with the Minutemen and that they made it somewhere out of sight and out of light. Satisfied, I put the phone up on the seat of the jet ski to my right. Then I re-fluffed my life jacket pillow and shut my eyes. I was confident that I would be awaken by the sun-setting breeze and the smell of the night coming to life.
The coarseness of whiskers brushed my cheek. I shooed them away. Nothing was going to wake me up from my dry out slumber. Besides, it seemed like minutes before that, my ears were being assaulted by the twanging air horns of the Austin High Fivers Club. I felt the whiskers again and I heard something sniffing me. Rodent.
My eyes beamed open as I licked the roof of my mouth. I was face-to-face with an opossum who was using its front legs to prop itself onto one of the jet ski’s footboards. I didn’t how long it had been observing me but I knew I had invaded its home.
I curled my index finger like a puppet to talk to it. “Hey there, buddy.”
It inched a little closer and sniffed again. Then it batted his eyelashes over its black, little eyes. I pulled back a little. For the most part, domestic animals liked vampires because we gave off a scent like we’re dead. I had never really rolled the dice with other animals, outside of the rats I that used to consume and get high off of on Skid Row. Rats weren’t dangerous—outside of transmitting plagues and disease—in that they were easy to catch and never really fought. The fact of the matter was that I had never seen an opossum up close. Even though it looked cute enough, I tried to limit my movement, as well as quiet my voice.
I squinted my left eye and continued my puppetry. “Is this your house, little buddy?”
It ducked down and then got on its hind legs to sniff my moving finger. It was so close that I started to get concerned so I backed up as far as I could and pressed my spine against the jet ski behind me. I steadied my finger as it seemed to be more interested in it than my face.
I let out a calming breath. “I’m not here to mess up your stuff.”
A pencil thin ray of sunlight zipped through an eyelet on the tarp, reminding me that my best-case scenario was to have my new friend quickly learn the meaning of the word share. It turned around to look behind it and then turned back to lick some blood off my finger. I felt the mushed bag of Combos in my pocket. Perhaps a nice peace offering would make my check-in go a little easier.
I shuffled my free hand down slowly toward it. The snacks crunched around onto the floor of the trailer as I attempted to maneuver my hips enough to get into my pocket. I accidentally bumped into the jet ski supporting my back a little harder than I would have liked, sending my precious bottle of Oxy clanking and shaking from the top of my thigh onto the metal trailer. In the moment, I shushed the bottle as I tried to grab and silence it with the hand extended to the critter.
That was when all fucking hell broke loose.
The opossum curled its nose, scrunched back its head and let out an enormous “Hsssssssss!” Unlike a rat, this wingless bat had inch-long knives for teeth. The top of its tongue rolled around its mouth like a semi-translucent cavern. The varmint was hungry, and Combos were not going to satisfy it. I stared at the blue tarp approximately three and a half feet from my face. A light blue circle in the center of the tarp told me that the sun was directly overhead. I was trapped.
I looked at the bottle of Oxy and then into the eyes of the opossum.
Let’s gEt hiGh.
“Hey, little buckaroo.”
As I jammed the pill bottle back into my pocket and shot my back straight, I snatched some dock rope from the seat of the jet ski behind me. I heard my phone fall off onto the outside rim of the trailer.
Without batting its eyes again or hissing, the opossum let out a fierce rumble and leapt onto my face. I didn’t realize it until it started burrowing those claws into my cheeks that this little asshole had crazy monkey hands.
I made the second strike. I grabbed it under its arms and pushed my fingers into its armpits. Feeling the pain, it started to loosen the grip on my face. Unfortunately for me, a claw that had bored into my temple was stuck. Stuck to my face and in pain, the agitated mega-rat began snipping at the tip of my nose with the short bridge of Chiclet teeth in front of its snout. Then, by focusing all its weight into its mid-section, it unhooked its claw from my head. Able to move around more freely, it sunk its fangs into my thumb.
I dropped the animal, slicing my thumb right down the center. “Motherfucker!” I cried.
I shoved my thumb into my mouth to suck in the blood. It might as well have filled the fresh wound with lighter fluid. I snapped it back out and captured the opossum’s paw. I bent it backwards, and as I snapped it, I felt it go limp. The creature’s hisses and growls turned to squeals as I did the same to its other arm. With my free hand, I began securing the opossum to the fiberglass gas tank. It squirmed for a bit but I had officially gotten the upper hand as I started hog-tying it to the tank and around the handlebars with the dock rope.
“That’s right. You’re gonna get me high.”
I had secured it on its stomach with its legs pinned to the tank. It let out a last squeal and then went silent. I blew into its face to see if it was playing ‘possum. It sneezed back.
I managed to nab one of the bricks outside from under the tarp. It was a great thing that the homeowners went to work or school, because the commotion going on with the opossum and the fact that my head was now propping up the tarp like a teepee were both red flags that screamed TRESPASSER. I started mashing up the Oxy.
I looked over at the opossum as I pushed the brick onto the pills. “You don’t have an Amex, do you?” It sniffed twice and then went back to pretending it was dead. I pried open the seat compartment on the jet ski slightly and dug through some suntan lotion, the keys to the vehicle on what felt like a floaty keychain and some condoms until I hit pay dirt: a laminated boating license. I pulled it out as I noticed the opossum sneakily gnawing on the rope. I blew in its face again. Its eyes closed.
I put the license under the small beam of light coming through the eyehole and squinted to see the shit-eating grin of the face behind my high-fiving cowboy. “Cody Walker, huh? Well, Cody, you will be preparing my opiates today.” I sat with my legs around my drugs and began cutting and sifting the powder with the license.
Pleased with myself and happy with the results, I looked around for my tools. The nabbed syringe from the Sixty-Second Clinic. Check. I tapped on my left front pocket. Sweet, my lighter was still there. I drew my finger across the fuel lever and up came a flame. Check on fire. Finally, I dug into my pants and pulled out the cotton that I stashed under my balls. Check. It was a little moist but that didn’t really matter. I had everything.
SpOon.
I forgot the fucking spoon. Dammit.
I put the tools on the seat of the jet ski and crawled toward the rear of the trailer, feeling around on the ground, hoping to find something—anything—to replace the important final utensil. No luck. I crawled back to the compartment on the opossum’s vehicle and dragged my hand from front-to-back and side-to-side. There was nothi
ng in there but a moldy, stinky ass wetsuit that some moron hadn’t hung out to dry.
I coughed from inhaling the airborne bacteria. “Fuck me!” Nearly defeated, I returned to my little seat in the middle of the trailer.
I looked at the opossum. “Any ideas?” I waited for an answer, briefly. “Of course not.”
HuRRy uP.
I was getting twitchy and I scratched at my arms. The Gooch wanted results. I looked to the back of the trailer again and then I covered every inch of the ground with my palms down. There had to be something. When I reached the end and I was seconds away from slapping myself in the face, my fingertips caught something, the solid chrome tailpipe of the jet ski. My dead heart skipped a beat. It was a relatively thin chrome pipe. Thankfully, it didn’t have any black powder coating on it.
I quickly crept back to the mid-section of the trailer and delicately swept the Oxy onto the face of the boating license, making sure as little as possible remained on the floor. Then I put the syringe in my mouth and held the lighter under my chin.
When I reached the rear of the trailer this time, I bent up the license into the exhaust and poured the Oxy inside. My mission was to spread it evenly into a thin coat near the center of the cylinder. I tied the brick to another piece of dock rope that was intended to tie the tarp onto the trailer and then shoved it off the tailgate, giving me a little air duct to expel smoke while I was cooking. I didn’t want to overwhelm myself with the fumes from the butane lighter and the burning narcotic. Without letting my body fall into the sunlight, I twisted around the trunk of the jet ski so I could light the pipe from underneath and watch the cook as it dissolved. To keep my dinner from getting thick and lumpy, I pulled one of the safety pins out of my pocket.
I fired up the lighter under the pipe and began moving the Oxy powder around with the pin. It took a while but through trial and error my feast turned to a syrup as it began bubbling. Once I got it to a nice consistency, I freed up my stirring hand and nabbed one of the cotton balls sitting in my lap. Using a combination of my teeth and my fingers, I tore off a light piece and lightly rolled it to the size of Junior Mint. As the caramelized mound became less dense and dirty looking, I place my little cotton ball in the center. Instantaneously, the cotton absorbed the creamy contents of the chrome pipe. I dropped the lighter and licked my lips.