by Jim Couper
Fearful they might have their heads relocated by nasty vamps, a mass of zombs trundled off into the woods. A few vamps sank canines in departing zombies' necks then projectile vomited.
Victor, worried about changed circumstances, unpocketed his phone and speed-dialled his favorite hookers. "Meet me behind Second Sip," he told them and gave precise times separated by 15-minute intervals. He strolled to a dark spot behind the nearby coffee shop and waited for the pleasure of their arrival.
"I guess you're Demona," he said as a blonde wearing a short skirt arrived, "I'm a bit confused because I specified you wear a low, revealing blouse."
"Yea, I’m Demona, the one you called. But I'm not that big on top. I was afraid you'd be turned off. Where do you want to go?"
Victor opened his wallet and counted out five 20s. "I'd like to pay you first, if you don't mind."
"No problem," she said and stepped forward and grabbed the money. "What will it be?"
"Come into the trees and I'll show you." Victor suggestively glanced down and then backed towards a thick oak.
"I'm not going into the dark with you. No way, that sucks."
"But I like nature. I'll add another 50." Victor pulled out his wallet.
"Well, maybe, but nothing kinky.” Demona snapped the single bill from his fingers, “Kinky costs more than 50 bucks."
When she stepped under the overhanging tree Victor wrapped one hand around her mouth and pulled her out of sight. "Now we'll see who sucks," he said as he pulled her silk blouse below her shoulders to the tune of ripping seams. He presented her bare upper body to the skinny native chief who emerged from the woods before any other. He moaned in shameless ecstasy as he had his way with the blonde. The powerful red drug surged from her neck into his veins giving tumescence to the sagging wrinkled body. The other side of her neck went to a semi-dormant woman wearing a charcoal sari who got a small portion of the potion due to the chief’s potent thirst.
Thus went the night as hooker after hooker went for the money and succumbed to a sucking. Sated straws drove the whore's bodies to distant places where the women would wake without recent memory and with $100 or more in their clasp. They found little to complain about while Victor had a lot to complain about. His cohorts reverted to greed and several hookers would have been drained to death had he not intervened.
“This is a sustainable resource,” Victor warned. “We have to think of our future. A dry hooker is a dead hooker and a dead hooker can never bleed for us again.”
Even after every prostitute and call girl in the area had arrived for a date, demand exceeded supply. Newly animated bodies had prodigious appetites and Victor didn’t know where he would find enough blood. Every time he looked around a new vampire appeared and demanded drink. If they started slurping from regular humans who didn’t have shady night jobs what would they do with all the spent bodies? Victims required recovery time. Dozens of memory-deprived people waking up in wooded parks would surely alert police. Detectives would compare notes and know that something wasn’t on the level. Victims would be sent to doctors, blood tests would be done and when it became known that all had the same anaemic condition thousands of years of secrecy would be in jeopardy.I could be worse than Salem.
With the first flicker of sunlight above the mountains the vamps sheltered in vacated crypts, climbed into the drooping branches of willow trees and sequestered themselves amongst rocks. Cloaks, jackets and shawls shielded faces and, with bodies wrapped in dark fabrics, they blended in with the terrain and waited out the day. Ironically, several hunkered down within a few yards of reclusive zombies who shared their loathing of daylight.
A few vamps, bursting with blood, drove home to dark rooms cloaked by blinds and heavy black drapes. With them they took many newly revived who had received transfusions. The energized neonates were introduced to life in 2015 and then devoted their new lives to YouTube, 3D flat screen, Face book and Wii.
12
As head of the RCMP detachment, Jane Dougherty could choose to work weekdays, 9 to 5, however she took her share of weekend and graveyard shifts and didn’t hesitate to step in for someone suffering an illness.
With terror and turmoil raging through her town she caught a few winks only when her head involuntarily drooped onto her chest and then slowly edged downward onto her desk. There it stayed until the phone rang or someone rapped on her door. She barely knew what constituted day and what made up night. Her office had no outside window and the old analog clock on the wall did not designatea.m. or p.m. Not a thought went towards eating a meal, calculating overtime or taking a 15-minute break to enjoy the donuts that had added an inch or two to her waist and helped her grow into her nickname, Jane Dough. Age and weight seemed to have found a fixed ratio: as a 20-year-old she hit the scales at a perfect 120. Ten years later she weighed 10 pounds more. A month ago, on her 35th birthday, she got on the scales and saw what she expected − 135. She envisioned herself at age 50: 150 disgusting pounds with a silver Brillo pad atop a double-chinned head that presently sprouted curly brown hair enhanced with an auburn tint she applied herself. She would still be toiling thanklessly behind the same desk, with rolls of fat supporting drooping breasts that could cushion her tired head and spare the desk. Once a year someone who was not a felon would ask her out on a date. He wouldn’t be interesting, the date would be boring and she would go home to the only house she had ever owned. Her knees would go, she’d walk with a limp and the chairman of the board would ask, as he had a hundred times before, “Do you think you can meet the physical demands of your position?” The chauvinist swine referred to her inability to wrestle in the mud with suspects and physically subdue gangsters in back alleys.
The chairman couldn’t understand that when she politely asked perps, “Would you please put your hands behind your back so I can cuff you?” there had not been a single refusal, not one charge of resisting arrest. If she encountered one of the new murdering creatures of the night that’s the strategy she would employ. If it worked on a drunken wife-beater why wouldn’t it work on a mass murderer?
Before involuntary sleep dropped her head to the desk and robbed her of productive thoughts, Jane decided her department was being too reactive and too passive in this time of crisis. Rumors that the army would take over circulated freely, but until that happened the local police ruled. She scribbled some notes and phoned newspapers and TV stations to tell them a curfew had been put in place and anyone on the streets between sunset and sunrise risked being arrested or killed by predators that did their work at night. Or citizens they might be mistaken for murderers and shot by police. An unspecified reward was offered for the capture of the murderers. Jane’s budget had no such funds, but she figured she could find money if necessary and hoped it would be necessary. She gave Constable Smith, chatting aggressively with a woman in the front office, the job of creating curfew notices, printing them and posting them around town. How traditional, she thought, imagining sepia posters, with pictures of villains, nailed to trees: Wanted Dead or Alive: Reward.
An assessment of all the station’s armament took 15 minutes as did sending out notification that all squad cars must carry tear gas, two shotguns, two spotlights and extra ammunition. Bullet-proof vests must be worn at all times, said the bold type, and riot shields must be in the back seats of cars and be carried during any confrontation with any force of evil. She liked that phrasing.
Greeting, meeting and informing waves of newcomers had taken so much of her time she hadn’t visited all the crime scenes let alone stopped at Tim’s for coffee, calories and conversation. She felt like a traffic cop giving directions to confused motorists rushing past. Getting feedback from regulars at Tim’s trough often helped direct her actions, but today the double dipped doughnuts would have to wait. She set off to make up for the lack of crime scene investigation.
The rocky shore where her officer made the call about dancing Draculas had a tranquility that contradicted the horror. One officer had died of blood
loss, according to the hospital, and the other two were receiving transfusions in intensive care. Their prospects looked good. The loss of an excellent police officer and a good family man pained her and brought shudders of sorrow whenever she thought of his children playing at the annual police picnic. She had visited the hospital and spoken to two pale, police who had no recollection of what happened to them. Even when she recreated the scene they remembered nothing of fighting on the beach or going to hospital by boat.
None of it made sense. From out of nowhere, on a quiet autumn day, came some monster, or team of monsters, that killed citizens and officers by ripping out guts and brains or draining blood. In Peachland, of all places! In one of the quietest, most crime-free towns in all of North America. There wasn’t much about local life she didn’t know: no cults, gangs or weird sects made their homes in town or surrounding hills. Everyone was talking about zombies, aliens and vampires but she wasn't going to be sucked into that line of senseless thought.
As the sun set behind her Jane couldn't get her mind to accept that much of her detachment had been destroyed and many friends fiendishly murdered. The shock and trauma were relentless and the carnage went beyond anything she had ever read about or heard about. If her professional position had not made so many demands on her actions and thoughts, she would have been swept away in despair and hopelessness.
Lights from roadblocks on the bridge flashed constantly and three helicopters roared in to destroy peaceful thought. Two belonged to news services and the third looked like Search and Rescue. Apparently Regina headquarters had used its influence to get a bird in the air, but hadn’t bothered to share the good news. Behind her a dozen army men in full combat gear worked at setting up a command post. Did that make it official, she wondered. Had the army taken command? No one had sent confirmation.
Communication was the first failure in a crisis. Damn it, she thought, nap for a few moments and it’s a whole new ball game when you wake up. She made a mental note to welcome the army and helicopter crew and thank them for their assistance. As if she had time.
With all that activity around her, even with 12 men with grenades and Colt carbine rifles waiting for something to shoot at, she felt on edge, frightened. Every snapped twig and every kicked stone brought a rush of adrenalin and she spun around expecting Jack the Ripper or a skeleton from a horror movie to pounce on her. A voice from behind startled her and she spun and withdrew her sidearm as she fell to a crouch on the gravel.
"Hey, don’t shoot. It's just me," agent Sinclair blurted. His protest came in time to save his life. "I’ve got what you wanted."
Where did he come from, Jane asked herself. Her eyes and ears had taken in everything. The combat unit questioned every person it encountered, except those in uniform, yet Donald Sinclair, in plain clothes, walked up behind her as if she was lined up to buy coffee and a Boston cream. She jammed another mental note into her crowded cranium and it said, “Stop thinking about donuts.”
"Scared the shit outta me, I admit it," Jane said. "Why didn't you say something?"
"I did. I told you, I've got the goods." Sinclair stuck out his left hand and what looked like an old English saddle from a miniature horse dangled from his muscular forearm.
"You going riding? Kinda rocky around here. Lots of marmot holes."
"Look more closely."
She took two steps towards him and lifted what draped over his arm and then quickly stepped back. "My God. It can't be."
"Got him a few hours ago. Knew where to look."
Jane approached again and poked at the thing dangling lifelessly. "It’s so cute. Look at its little legs and head. I just didn't know. That’s so sad." Jane abruptly looked up and added, "You're not a joker are you? That isn’t a prop?"
"No ma'm. I've never found humor in a dead gnome. Especially all drained and flat. Don't forget, you’re actually looking at an alien."
Jane moved closer and lifted a short arm of dark, brown skin. "I just never believed. How is it possible?"
"People have known about them for thousands of years. Gnomes, gremlins, goblins, leprechauns – they have secret lives. We rarely see them. Obviously aliens see them. They’re interacting with them. Aliens see things we can't."
Jane lifted the chin of the little fellow to look at his tiny, leathery face and he slipped off the agent's arm and his soft head bashed a rock. "Oh I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to hurt him."
"He's dead."
"I know, but I damaged him. He's so helpless. How could anyone do that to him? Look at his little lifeless hands."
"Actually I don't think anyone did. The aliens’ project has gone wrong. They intended to duplicate the forest creatures so that they, themselves, can live in secret and study humans. But they didn't make them right. Their blood and other fluids leaked out. They went flat."
"How come my men on the beach suffered the same? Hardly any blood left in them. It’s either that or they get disembowelled and lose their brains. The work of aliens?"
"The explanation for that is far more complex. It has to do with aliens seeing their prototype creatures go flat and they believe Earthlings killed them. Earthlings killed the baby creatures they made. So they avenge the murders."
"That's ridiculously convoluted. You mean aliens drain blood from my officers and tear them apart because they think the police hurt the gnomes that the aliens made as disguises?" Jane asked the question while she picked up the fallen creature. Bits of skull broke off as she placed the little fellow back on Sinclair's arm. Sinclair didn’t answer so she added, "Your hypothesis has a few flaws."
The stalemate became awkward until he responded, "Look, I'm open to other interpretations. This isn’t the first time I've held these critters in my arms. My partner and I are the only people in the world who research these kinds of massacres. No one else connects the dots."
"Ok, sorry about not understanding. Only had a few hours sleep. I've lost count of the number of officers down. There's a guy in hospital with a chewed-off leg mumbling about zombies. We got a call from an officer who saw dancing vampires, a report suggested Bigfoot did it, you have the skin of a gnome over your arm and you say it’s actually an alien. And I challenge your theory? We've passed madness. The army has come in, thank God. This wasn't covered in training."
Jane continued to stroll along the beach looking for evidence or clues that the CSI team had missed and her investigators had missed and the special team from Kamloops had missed. She kicked stones and turned over twigs hoping to find a signed note from a drug dealer ordering the extinction of all his imagined enemies in the cruelest way possible. Behind her Sinclair drifted like a ghost. Only one thing’s missing, she thought, a ghost. Maybe Sinclair will appear tomorrow with Casper in a plastic bag. Maybe Ghostbusters will swoop in and round up the bad guys. Maybe I'm on my way to break up a dispute about a bad line call at the tennis club and I'm daydreaming and nothing about this is real. Sinclair says it's over. He says it stops as quickly as it began. He better be right.
Jane abruptly turned to speak to the agent and found him just two yards behind. Before she could address him he quietly said, "I told you it was over, didn't I? That it ends as fast as it starts."
"You did, and I wanted to ask you about that. What happens next?"
"That's the easy part. My partner Joey arrives and we clean up. We get rid of all the things that people don't understand, including this." He raised his arms slightly to show what had to be cleaned up and the slippery gnome took another tumble onto its head.
"Oops. Anyway the human bodies get picked up, cremated if possible and a long, slow investigation eventually files a report, in a year or two, saying that some sort of botulism from home-pickled beets caused stomachs to explode and skulls to break. That's what people want to hear. They want to believe that as long as they don't eat Aunt Maud's pickled beets they remain safe. Sure, the people who witnessed it don't believe a word, but that's OK because people don't believe the people who don't believe. Joey and
I haul away the evidence and save some of it in our alien museum."
"Gimmie a break! Why don't you wear black? Or are you the Men in Beige? Do you erase memories? How could I know about that?"
Sinclair took the sarcasm in stride and explained that his museum displayed nothing living. Mostly it had dead leprechauns and that sort of thing. Plus photographic evidence of the deaths the aliens caused. It featured no creatures from space, no memory erasers or guns that blasted through walls. It didn’t accept visitors.
13
Funerals in which the living said goodbye to residents of Cream Bay Mobile Home Park took place over several days. Bodies not cremated found interment in one of the town’s two cemeteries. A government-sponsored funeral for nine fallen police officers took place in the city of Kelowna where a hockey arena seated thousands of mourners.
Vamps visited the cemeteries where un-cremated Cream Bay dead would end up and found a couple more comrades energized by rogue radio waves that leeched through the earth. They worked stealthily and neatly, leaving no indication they had been there. The mess left by zombies in the cemetery disgusted them and they made an effort at restoring order by pushing dirt back into graves and smoothing out the ground to cover puddles of drool. Public panic about rising dead did no one any good.