Low-Skilled Job [Vol. 1]

by Roger Keller

  “I thought we might need tools, but I suppose not.” The Hunter pulled on the dusty handle. The vault creaked open. “Such arrogance.”

  The Hunter and his biker army climbed into a room straight out of a Hammer horror movie. A dozen coffins, made of polished carved wood, waited on stone pedestals.

  “I don’t fucking believe it,” the raccoon coat biker said. “You weren’t kidding Franco.”

  Franco ignored him and drove a bayonet blade under the lid of the nearest coffin. The Hunter joined him, silver stake in hand. They threw back the lid. The vampire inside raised his arm. The Hunter pushed it away and drove the stake into his chest, blood and white smoke poured from the wound. He then produced a Soviet pilot’s survival tool. I’d seen them for sale in the early Nineties, right after the wall came down. It must have been something else to see one outside of Russia back in the Sixties. Franco’s eyes narrowed when he saw a communist star molded into the red grips. The Hunter hacked the vampire’s head off with a few short strokes. Blood exploded across the dusty wall, narrowly missing him

  “This one is ready for the fire,” he said.

  The bikers gathered around and tried to lift the coffin.

  “Just the body,” Franco said. “We’ll burn the whole fucking house when were done.”

  The bikers carried the headless body out. A roaring bonfire waited, fed by the dying oak tree. The Hunter repeated the process over and over, caught up in the moment. He didn’t see Franco drift away. The biker seemed propelled forward by some force. He opened the last coffin. Karla lay there, as naked as when I saw her on Lee’s couch. Her head turned. She took Franco’s grease stained hand.

  “Oh no, Franco, you fool,” the Hunter said.

  Franco drove his fist into the Hunter’s solar plexus, doubling him over. The Russian survival tool fell to the floor. The biker’s joined their leader and stomped the vampire hunter senseless. Franco helped himself to the P38 and the Russian pilot’s tool.

  “Don’t kill him,” Karla said, “not yet”

  The bikers turned from their victim to see Karla standing by her coffin, nude and bone white. Somehow I knew she was starving for blood and that she enjoyed feeling that way. It kept her sharp. Mouths dropped open. A few pointed their guns at her. Franco laughed.

  “What are we gonna do?” Franco looked at his hand, dazed.

  “We are going to church,” Karla said.

  She walked, naked, between the bikers without fear or shame. Her claws extended and retracted as she moved. The bikers gawked at her.

  “Why you wanna go to fuckin’ church, baby?” Raccoon Coat said. He was the only one, besides Franco, who could meet her predator’s gaze.

  “You’ll see when we get there,” Karla said.

  “Won’t the sun burn you?” Franco took off his denim jacket and offered it to her.

  “The sun has set. Time seems to have gotten away from you.” Karla brushed the dust from her long black hair.

  The bikers followed Karla across the dead lawn. She’d dressed in a long black cloak and shiny, red go-go boots. The group paused at the bonfire. The bikers who’d drawn wood chopping duty stood up, axes ready.

  “Change of plans guys,” Franco said, his eyes glistening in the firelight. “We’re workin’ for her now.”

  The bikers shrugged. Karla kicked a stone into the fire and said something in Spanish. She laughed. The sound cut through the night. One-per-center bikers shrank back from her.

  “You bastards,” the Hunter said.

  “Shut up.” Franco punched him in the stomach. The hunter doubled over, but was held up by two of the bikers.

  The biker horde, now led by Karla, who had commandeered the vampire hunter’s Mustang, pulled up to a small, Spanish style church. An aging priest threw open the doors and shuffled down the steps to confront them. His knees buckled when he saw Karla step out of the Mustang.

  “You, you should be-” he said.

  “Have one on us, old man.” Franco put his arm around the priest and handed him a bottle of tequila.

  “This is consecrated ground.” The priest struggled with Franco and held up his rosary.

  Karla moved forward, taking several steps at once. She moved too fast to see, even on my TV. She closed a porcelain hand over the rosary. Smoke rose from between her fingers.

  “Your faith was always weak, Alejandro,” she said. “Your sins though, were something to be proud of, once.”

  Alejandro took the bottle and drank. Franco patted him on the back. The other bikers cheered. “Right on Padre.”

  “We have need of your services,” Karla said.

  “A blasphemous wedding perhaps? And which one of these fine young men will be your groom.” The priest reeled from the alcohol.

  “Not tonight,” she said and smiled. “Tonight we are having a funeral.”

  “I see.” The priest swallowed hard.

  Karla snapped her fingers in the air and the Mustang’s trunk opened. The bikers drug the vampire hunter out, while another group hoisted a coffin from the rustred truck.

  “That will be perfect,” Karla said.

  “Yeah, we bought it for Small Block Sam, but there wasn’t nothing left of him, except ashes,” Franco said. “Now we’ll get some use out of it. Fuckin’ thing made for a lousy coffee table anyway.”

  “And I see you used the coffin for target practice as well,” Karla said.

  “We were really fucked up that night.” Raccoon Coat threw the vampire hunter to Karla’s feet.

  “What do you want from me?” the vampire hunter said. “Just kill me and finish it. My comrades will remember my sacrifice.”

  “Kill you, but you are already dead. You died the moment you entered my house and disturbed my sleep. I care nothing for the others you destroyed, but your insult to me must be punished.” Karla’s eyes burned a darker orange than Heather’s did.

  The priest led the funeral procession past an ancient stone wall to a graveyard. He held a massive leather bound Bible in one arm and the bottle of tequila in the other. The biker pallbearers set the coffin down next to a recently dug grave.

  “Do you wish me to preform the last rights, or say some prayer for you?” the priest asked the vampire hunter.

  “Go fuck yourself, priest,” the Hunter said.

  “Enough, put the dead man in his final resting place,” Karla said. “Though I know he will not rest in peace.”

  The vampire hunter realized what was happening and tried to fight back. It was hopeless. The bikers stuffed him into the coffin and nailed down the lid.

  “With all those holes, he ain’t gonna suffocate for a while, at least ‘till we start shoveling,” Franco said.

  Karla laughed. She held her hands at her sides. The cemetery came to life with the sounds of countless creeping things. Camouflaged by the night, they made their way to the coffin and found the many bullet holes. The bikers stood frozen in horror. A grotesquely huge centipede skittered over Franco’s engineer boots. He drew his bowie knife. Muffled screams grew louder, from the coffin, accompanied by a steady thumping.

  “Devour him.” Karla screamed into the night, arms raised.

  The priest held his Bible close and took a drink. Franco watched Karla.

  “Bury the dead man,” Karla said. “Father, say your words, in Latin.”

  *****

  “Are you listening to me?” Heather said. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

  She grabbed my shirt and shook me. The images on the TV faded. A credit roll replaced the grim scene in the cemetery.

  “I could see it,” I said. “Everything you were saying. It was right there on the screen.”

  “What?” She looked back at the TV.

  “I saw them bury the vampire hunter alive, in a coffin full of bugs,” I said.

  “I didn’t tell you about that part,” she said. “I always thought Karla made that shit up. You think she could like, really command insects?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.
“I’m not even sure what the hell I just saw.”

  “I wish I could have seen it,” she said.

  “Why didn’t the priest’s cross work on Karla?” I looked at Heather’s cross and the marks it left on her breasts.

  “It only works when one of us is really into evil, like devil worship and stuff,” she said. “Even then you have to be a really good person for that to work.”

  “How did Karla control Franco,” I said, wondering if she was doing the same thing to me.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “How do you do what you do?”

  “You don’t know much, or maybe you just don’t want to tell me certain things,” I said. “Are sure I’m a vampire hunter? Maybe you’re just fucking with me.”

  “You see what I really look like,” she said. “Lee and the others couldn’t sense you coming. They were so fuckin’ scared. It was awesome. And by the way, you already killed two revenants, so technically you are a vampire hunter.”

  “What you really look like?” I said. “What exactly did Ray see, when you lured him up here?”

  “Whatever he wanted to see,” she said. “They all see something different.”

  Heather took another drink of blood and color returned to her skin. The golden brown tones reminded me of my dream. The change to her flesh was physical and something she was out of practice doing. She ground her hips against me. I swallowed hard.

  “We’ll just figure things out as we go,” she said.

  She pulled close and kissed me. I could taste Ray’s blood, coppery and still cool from the fridge.

  “I guess we will,” I said.

  I helped Heather out of her sweater and pressed my face into her breasts. She pulled the cross out of the way and I kissed the burn marks. I lay back on the futon and dug through my wallet for a condom. Heather tugged at my belt in a frustrated, refreshingly human sort of way.

  We finished on the floor. Heather’s claws and teeth returned as she neared climax. She hesitated, her claws hovering over my chest. Then Heather arched her back and turned her claws on herself, slicing deep into her breasts and belly. I ran my fingers over the bloodless wounds and felt them close. She collapsed on my chest, her body already cooling. The thought occurred to me that we had crossed some kind of line.

  Heather joined me in the shower. We cleaned up in silence. By then there was no trace of the claw marks on her skin. After that we curled up together on the futon. Heather wore one of my t-shirts and nothing else. The movie played on repeat in the background.

  “How long have you been a vampire?” I said.

  Heather groaned.

  “Um, it was, like, 1982,” she said. “I use movie release dates to remember things. Yeah, it was October. The first Rambo movie came out and Halloween Three, which I was really waiting for. There was this concert. I don’t remember what bands I saw that night. I just remember, I went home with Lee.”

  “What about-” I said.

  “Look, I don’t know much about vampire history, or even what we can do,” she said “Like that thing I do with locks, it took like, three years to figure that out. We just watched Invasion U.S.A. and I decided to steal a Camaro. I was just goofing around and the doors unlocked. Lee pretended like he knew I could do it all along, but I could tell he was freaked out. I can start most old cars. GM’s were the easiest. If I try it on new cars, it just fries the computers.”

  I ran my fingers through her tangled, wet hair and smoothed it back. She smiled and batted my hand away.

  “Anyway, the story everybody knows,” Heather said, “is that Lee killed all the vampire elders in the city. There’s others out there, like in Chicago and New York. They probably know all kinds of shit.”

  “You ever try to contact them?” I said.

  “I never thought of that,” she said. “We should just call ‘em up. Ancient vampires are known for answering boring questions and being helpful.”

  “OK,” I said.

  “Everything I do know is all rumor and hearsay,” she said. “Lee and Karla are the only ones that really know anything.”

  “Yeah, and I don’t really want to go see them anytime soon,” I said. “That crazy mansion he lives in must have been something once.”

  “Well it’s not anymore,” Heather said. “Everything’s gone weird now. What you saw there, the other night, was nothing compared to the way it used to be. It was crazy back then. Everything peaked at the end of the Eighties. There must have been thousands of us once. The parties would go on for days. We had live music out on the production floor where all the machines used to be. Lee paid off the cops and we did whatever we wanted. I used to spend weeks just exploring the mill. That place is huge and it goes, like three floors underground. We’d hang out and fuck around down there and when we came back up there’d be snow on the ground.”

  “What about the ones I killed?” I said. “How’d they get that way?”

  “It might be like a disease, or maybe it just happens.” She looked away haunted.

  Something changed, Heather stood up, claws extended. A second later I felt it too.

  “What’s wrong?” I said.

  Heather shifted back to semi-normal and sat back down on the edge of the futon. She drummed her hands on her knees.

  “Like I told you before, the other revenants are still out there,” she said. “We burnt their home and you killed their friends. It’s only a matter of time. They are looking for us right now.”

  I went to my walk-in closet. I had a couple of guns stashed in there, in violation of Green Valley’s tenant policies. I laid the guns out on my futon, a Browning pump shotgun with the barrel cut back to eighteen inches, and a .44 magnum revolver. I loaded a Smith and Wesson, snub-nose .38 and stuffed it in my back pocket. Heather looked over the guns.

  “I thought you were worried about the cops, you know coming up here and finding all the evidence.” Heather picked up the .44.

  “These are more of a last resort,” I said. “I’m not sure what were going to be up against. Hell, we don’t even know how many are coming.”

  I imagined a whole army of revenants, made up of homeless people, gang members and anyone else that wouldn’t be missed. A horde of hastily transformed monsters pouring over the parking lot, climbing the walls, devouring everyone in their path until they got to my undefendable apartment.

  “Hopefully, you’re right about them not being too smart,” I said. “Will guns even work?”

  “Sort of,” she said. “If you do enough damage to ‘em, then they won’t be able to regenerate without more blood. They’ll be too weak to move and you can dispose of them whenever you want. Of course, if you don’t do enough damage, or if they’re really strong, then you’ll have a desperate, pissed off freak that needs blood at any cost.”

  Heather looked through the .44’s scope. She frowned and took out her multi-tool.

  “What if you shoot ‘em in the head?” I said.

  “They can still come back, but all confused and fucked up,” she said. “I’ve heard about vampires being shot in the head and coming back with amnesia.”

  Heather turned the little screws that held the scope on the .44. I poured some boxes of ammunition on the futon and loaded the shotgun.

  “I think I might have some silver coins,” I said.

  “I don’t think we’ll have time for that,” she said. “We’d have to melt the silver and, like, pour it into some hollow-points. There’s other metals that work as just as good, but they have to stay in the body. Even then it only weakens them. But, they can always pull the bullets out.”

  Heather tossed the damaged scope on the futon and played with the revolver. The unmistakable click of it’s hammer cocking spun me around.

  “Did I fire six shots or only five?” Heather pointed the gun right at my head. I could see right down the barrel and the empty chambers.

  “That’s not funny.” I grabbed the barrel and pulled. She didn’t let go. It was a ridiculous standoff. I knew she was pro
bably stronger than me, but for some reason I couldn’t let go.

  “Point taken, but I wanna use it.” She tilted her head down and bit her lower lip, unaware of how her prominent canine teeth were sort of ruining the effect.

  “Fine.” I let go.

  Heather smiled and padded into the living room, swinging the massive revolver at her side. I watched her pale legs as she walked. The t-shirt hiked up, just enough.

  I went back to the closet and drug out a cracked tote. It was full of camping gear that I’d bought for an expedition my ex was planning. The camping trip, or whatever she wanted to do never panned out. I always suspected that she just enjoyed the whole planning and shopping thing and never really wanted to go through with the trip. I pulled out a medium sized Estwing camp axe and a couple of sheath knives. Heather appeared next to me with no warning, dressed in her recently washed clothes. Her boots were tied army tight. She grabbed the SOG bowie knife and attached the sheath to her metal studded belt. I did the same with a Buck knife. I looked at the blade and realized it had only been out of it’s box once. Good, it still had the factory edge, sharp enough to shave with.

  *****

  I carried my axe out on the deck and looked over the dark parking lot. A man in a ragged leather duster knelt by the dumpsters. I tightened my grip on the axe. The man’s face and hands were wrapped in filthy ace bandages. Only his smoldering red eyes were visible. Heather joined me on the deck.

  “Finally,” she said. “Let ‘em come. Saves us the trouble of having to find them.”

  Another revenant walked casually through the parking lot. His hair was slicked back, Fifties style. The motor oil he’d used left black trails down his pallid face. He wore a motorcycle jacket and polished engineer boots.

  “Right up here, asshole.” Heather threw an empty beer bottle. It sailed through the air and hit the greaser in the back.

  He spun around, shaking with rage. The greaser almost seemed like a normal vampire. Then he held up a hand bristling with curved talons. He dug into his cheek, peeling away his own flesh. His lips went next, then the other cheek. He threw the ruined skin to the asphalt and opened his mouth wide. Blackened, rotting teeth grew to fit the open space. The dagger teeth looked like something some archaeologists might dig up and then cover back over, not wanting to know more for the first time in their lives.