Joe Vampire

by Steven Luna

  If Lucas enjoyed watching me squirm, he kept it close to the vest. “We came for him. We’ve been watching him for two years, letting him sell his shit from that warehouse he calls home, and waiting for the right moment to strike the fucker down. Meanwhile, he made you.” He kicked the head aside and leaned into my face again. “How many have you made, Joe? How many other vampires will I have to smack in this town before it’s clean?”

  I could smell his cologne, and his alcohol breath… and his blood surging beneath the veins in his neck. My head went dizzy. I thought about trying to lie my way through, but I could hardly gather the mental power to do it. “I haven’t bitten anyone,” I confessed.

  “I don’t believe you.” He was reading my eyes, looking for tells that would let him know I was a full-fledged, balls-out vampire. “You’re too complete and clean-looking not to have fed on someone. And I’m betting you don’t know much about your power, so you might have even changed some of them… maybe all of them.” He stood up again. “I want to know how you do it, so I can find the others like you.”

  So I told him. “Carrot juice, coconut water, raw beef. That’s it.” The bone vibration was getting worse.

  “Carrot juice and coconut water,” he repeated. “He’s fucking with us, Kyle. I’ll give you this much: you’ve got balls. But I don’t like being fucked with.” Jeremy sulked off in the corner. A few times I caught his eye and tried to send him the desperation in mine. He just looked away. Kyle took over, though he kept a little more distance than Lucas had. “Don’t be a little bitch, Joe. Tell us all about your freakish ways… this guy victimized homeless dudes by getting them hooked on crank; who have you been using to get your vampire rocks off? Do you jump women in the park on their way home from work? Or maybe you know a bunch of goth punks who let you bite them for five bucks a pop? You must have changed someone, even if you only did it by accident.” I could smell the bitter tang of his fear every time he exhaled. Lucas had none of that in his essence.

  Essence. I sound like one of the Nightfall kids.

  “Nope. No one. I haven’t bitten anybody; I haven’t changed anybody.”

  Lucas jumped in. “Don wouldn’t give anyone up either, but we knew he was lying, because here you are.” Wow. Don had stayed silent to protect me, even to his death.

  Eye-opening, to say the least.

  I tried to keep cool. “That was Don, not me.”

  “Are you sure you want to stick with your original answer? Sooner or later, we’ll find another… and another. You’re like any other vermin; for each one of you I see on the street, there’s a dozen more running around in the gutter, climbing over everyone else’s shit and waiting to bring the rest of us down to your level. However many of you there are, I’ll find them all… no matter how long it takes.” Whoa. Someone’s been watching too much Buffy. But I knew this wasn’t bluster, even if I couldn’t read his mind. Don was proof enough of that. “You’re a little more put together than the drug dealer was… not quite as much of a depraved loser. He didn’t cooperate, and we had to cut his head off before we were able to reason with him. If you’re honest with us, we might show you a little mercy.”

  The smell, the vibration, the leftover chemicals in my system – it was all starting to overwhelm me. Don’s head lying on the floor only made it worse. “Sorry, guys. I’m the only vampire I know.”

  His face said he already knew something, and he was just trying to get me to say it first. “What about a woman named Louise… big reader, loves to knit, wears a lot of wool sweaters? Does that name light up the little green ball anywhere on your Vampire Buddy List?” Louise? How the hell did he know about her?

  Was he a vampire, too? Was he seeing into my head?

  Kyle threw in his piece. “Or maybe her friend Megan… pretty girl, like a model or something. I think you had some intimacy issues with her, didn’t you? Have you done your vampire thing all over her neck by now, turned her into a bloodsucker like you?”

  I was afraid to say anything. Louise wasn’t just a guess, obviously, but Louise and Megan together were too direct a hit. It was at this point that I had my Sixth Sense epiphany, searching my tired memory for someone standing in the background of all these events like a spy in the House of Vampire. Maybe even Lucas himself, or Kyle or Jeremy, someone who had followed me everywhere, watching everything I’d been going through.

  Just how long had these fuckers known about me?

  Lucas joined back in. “Or how about your ex-best buddy Hube? Sounds like you two had a pretty nasty confrontation a while back. Did you finally take out your resentment on him? Your hatred at him for being healthy, hearty and whole… and human, I believe was how you put it.” I stopped searching my memory for the outsider who might have been tailing me. And I dropped the thought that Lucas was able to read my mind. He didn’t need to.

  Because I had told him all of those things myself.

  “So you’ve been following the blog, then. Is that it?”

  “Following it?” he scoffed. “Don’t flatter yourself. I broke into the damn thing and practically stole your worthless little identity so I could find you and get you taken care of. You left it wide open for any two-bit code cracker to shuffle his way into. Not too bright of you, Joe. You’re a smarter guy than that. Haven’t you ever heard of firewalls?”

  Damn. Bo hadn’t been the only hacker on my trail.

  “So you want to be a vampire killer. Why don’t you go after the homeless dudes, then? They’re all over the place down by Don’s loft.” That was shitty of me, to talk about them like they were nothing. Given the state I was in, I must have thought it was a perfectly allowable reach.

  “We’re going for quality here, not quantity,” Lucas explained. “And those guys are a closed loop; they have no one, and nowhere to go. They’ll just keep biting each other until they’re all sucked dry. They’ll obliterate one another soon enough, and save us the hassle. You, on the other hand? You’ve assimilated, blended in… and monsters like you who hide among the good people will never be found if we don’t flush you out and crush you ourselves.”

  What he said sounded plausible. I sort of broke then. “Someone’s going to notice I’m gone and come looking for me.”

  Lucas smirked. “Like who – your parents? They have too much TV to watch to worry about you. Your sister is never around; she won’t even know about you until it’s far too late to find anything, even if she were to come searching. And Lazer’s not even your friend, so he’s out.” He actually had read the posts – even the not-so-dazzling ones. He must have known everything.

  “Louise will. If I don’t show up for work, she’ll figure things out.” I said it like it was my ace in the hole.

  Really, it was his.

  “Let her come. Instead of two-for-one, we’ll have three. She’s next on our list anyway… and that’s thanks to you, too.”

  “Hube will come, then.”

  Kyle shook his head. “Not after the way you treated him. You can’t dick your friends around like that and expect they’ll come running to your rescue when you need them most. I’d be surprised if he even gives a shit that you’re gone. That blows your whole list.” For a second, I bought what the two of them were saying. But only for a second; something clicked after that. They hadn’t read my last post.

  They didn’t know Hube and I had a dude date for lunch.

  And it sounded like they might not know about Bo, either. His blog security must have kicked in just before those posts went up.

  As difficult as it was, I kept my mouth shut about them both. “So what, then? I don’t have any other vampire friends to turn you on to, and even if I did I wouldn’t tell you about them. So what are you going to do now – kill me like you did Don? Chop my head off and blame it on a drug cartel?”

  The light came back on. My eyes sizzled. “No, Joe,” Lucas said. “You’re not a drug dealer, so that wouldn’t fly on the six o’clock news. Instead, you’re simply going to disappear. You’re practi
cally a recluse as it is, so it wouldn’t be a huge leap in logic if you were to sign off on your blog one last time, from a remote, unnamed location, explaining that the blood lust got the better of you. You’ll be living out your days in some no man’s land, sulking through your pathetic everlife in peace. No more blogging the truth about vampires, no more witty insight from friendless, fuckless, hopeless Joe Vampire.” Okay… that was actually kind of clever. “And behind the scenes, what no one will really know is that we – Kyle, Jeremy and I – kept them safe from a monster like you, and other monsters coming down the line… by testing all the ways we might be able to kill a vampire. On you.” Wow.

  These bastards were really sick.

  “All you have so far is decapitation?” Probably not smart to taunt the executioner.

  Lucas shrugged, and I heard Kyle slink away. “It worked, but it was messier than we wanted it to be. We need a variety of methods.” Then Kyle came back lugging a trunk behind him, and the light dimmed.

  I think they wanted me to see everything they were going to do.

  Lucas flipped open the trunk and pulled out a stake made of stainless steel. He spun it around like he was gearing up for a knife fight. “We tried this one on your friend, but I think we might have missed his heart.”

  This was when the smart mouth thing snuck up on me again. “Yeah, those can be hard to find if you’re too fucking stupid to tell left from right.”

  Real bright, Joseph.

  Lucas raised the stake, and I watched wide-eyed as he stabbed it down with considerable force. It split one of the leather straps on the left side of my chest and plunged into my shoulder, cleanly through any flesh and bone that stood in its way, and planted itself in the wooden back of the chair. I had no idea I could howl like I did; I hardly recognized the sound as having come from my own throat. “It’s still a useful tool if you need to pin your specimen in place.” He pulled another one from the trunk and took care of my right shoulder.

  The vibrating worsened. I was reaching for the strength I had when Bo and I were going at it; even half of that would have been helpful. But there was nothing. I saw Jeremy in the distance, disappearing into the darkness.

  Kyle came back into view, this time with a tripod and a digital camcorder that he set up off to the side of their torture station. “We have another bunch of slick ways to take care of you,” Lucas told me, “We’re going to try them all, one by one, documenting the results as we go. But we need you fully functional, not half-bombed. So you’ll rest now.” He pulled something else from the shadows, something moving. “And you’ll need to keep up your strength – not too much, though, Tiger. We don’t need you going off half-cocked. We just need you strong enough to recognize your own suffering.” He stepped into the light and showed me a live rat cradled in his hands. With no second thought about it, he twisted its head and snapped its neck, then set the twitching corpse on my chest just below my chin. “Suck on that when you get hungry. We’ll see you in a while.”

  Just when I thought things couldn’t get any grosser.

  I could see clearly now what they were trying to do. This wasn’t just about figuring out ways to kill me; they wanted the Vampire Within to come out and play so they could justify murdering me. They thought plying me with blood would raise my vampire hackles enough to spark a reaction. And theirs was the upper hand; I had no brisket to suck on, no sports drink handy to balance out my electrolytes. The vibration, I knew now, was the hunger rising, and it was the worst feeling I’ve had since Crap Fest. The sensation of coming out of my own skin had become constant and continuous. It felt like I was dying all over again, but this time with my consciousness intact the whole way. And all I had to feed on was a dead rat lying on my chest.

  It was the first time since This happened that I hadn’t been able to take care of myself or keep things under my own control.

  More than being tortured or possibly even being killed, this, to me, was true terror.

  I came to understand how someone like Don, someone who hadn’t managed his condition from the beginning, would resort to drug use to dull the sensation. I could feel the vampire parts trying to claim the rest of me, whatever Joe parts I’d been able to keep whole by sheer will and Louise’s sage advice. The Joe parts were fighting back with what little might they still had, but I knew they weren’t strong enough in this condition to go the distance. In all of our conversations, Louise and I had somehow failed to cover what might happen if a vampire refuses to feed, even from the blood of lesser animals. Maybe it all comes down to some version of re-death; maybe there was something even worse waiting for me down the line. Either way, there wasn’t a chance in hell I’d feed in front of these jags, no matter how dicey it got.

  I was, to put it in my own terms, up shit creek without a bottle of coconut water.

  But after all the work I’d done to keep this fucking impulse at bay, I wasn’t about to give them the satisfaction of watching it all come undone.

  POST 43

  Bloodletting

  I had no idea how long they left me there, strapped to a chair and pinned at the shoulders with a camera trained on my face and a spotlight shining on me. I kept my eyes closed for the most part, trying to use the mind-clearing exercises Louise had turned me on to, extending them into pain control as much as I could. With no heartbeat to keep track of, I made myself count my breaths, even though they were shallow and nearly useless. If nothing else, it kept me calm under fire. There were moments when everything went still and white, and I wondered if I had died, finally and for real. Then a surge of indignant anger would slam through me, and I’d be wide awake and back in the chair, panic-stricken and questioning my sanity. I knew it was the vampire parts struggling to survive by fighting my unintentional attempts to starve them out. And right beside them were the Joe parts struggling to survive, period. Both were working in my favor, keeping me alive while I was smack dab in the middle of someone else’s attempt to kill me. More than any progress I had been able to make with it, I think the situation helped unify the two halves into a single being with a single purpose. But once those dickheads came back and did whatever they were going to do, it wouldn’t matter.

  As one whole or in two halves, all of me would likely be in many more non-figurative pieces than that in a very short while.

  It could have been hours or days that had passed when they finally returned. I couldn’t tell. By that time, I didn’t have enough strength left to think. But I smelled their blood as they came in and I felt the vibration practically shatter my bones. So I breathed, squinted into the unbearable light and watched their silent figures preparing for whatever masochistic procedures they had on their list. Then they turned down the light, and I heard their plans unroll as they narrated documentation for the camera. Lucas controlled it like a science lab, with a clinical arrangement of tools and narration for every step. Kyle was his faithful assistant, like an overly worked-out Igor. Jeremy kept to the background again. They spoke, but said nothing to me as they worked. “Subject has been isolated for 72 hours,” Lucas said. No emotion whatsoever. They saw the rat carcass on the floor and knew I hadn’t fed from it. “Subject has had no nourishment, blood-based or otherwise, since prior to experiment period.”

  “Discovery Channel will… love you guys.” I could hardly speak, but somehow, I could still make wisecracks.

  That was the thread my sanity was hanging by.

  They didn’t respond. “Today we’ll be enacting a series of procedures in an attempt to better understand the impact of various stimuli on Sanguine Vampiris.” So there was a scientific name for me after all.

  I shouldn’t have cut my vampire research Google session short, I guess.

  Then he ran down the array of happy times he had in store for me, no doubt playing mind games in an effort to win my cooperation. I just listened as his voice droned… and, of course, I was making bullet points in my head while he spoke.

  • These stimuli will include the application of ex
treme heat to the dermis and soft tissue… – Kyle fired up a blowtorch and narrowed the flame. They were going to burn my flesh to see what would happen.

  • … as well as extreme cold – Lucas lined up a collection of small tanks marked SuperChill. I recognized them from internet ads as liquid nitrogen used for home use in removing skin tags and stuff… so they were going to freeze me, too.

  • In matters of vivisection, we will be removing the incisors to document the subject’s ability to regenerate – Kyle pulled out the gnarliest pair of non-dental pliers I’d ever laid eyes on. They were going to rip out my fangs and see if they’d grow back.

  • Ultimately we will be performing a cardiactomy to gauge the extent of continuation for vitality beyond removal, as well as for post-mortem dissection of cardiac tissue… – Lucas fired up a little circular saw, and the whine of it nearly shattered my eardrums. They were going to cut out my heart to see what happened next.

  • … and a craniotomy to examine what possible differences might exist between human and vampire neural matter – They were also going to cut into my brain and take a look at what made my head tick.

  • Any extraneous biological material that might remain will be dissolved in a hydrogen chloride-based solution to prevent the spread of possible viral organisms beyond the host subject – Kyle dragged an industrial steel drum out of the darkness. They’d finish up the show by using acid to eat away whatever was left of me.

  How disturbingly complete they were. So clinical and methodical.

  They must have watched as many science TV documentaries as I did… and I was entirely disappointed that I recognized all the terminology. Otherwise, I might have been numbly unaware of what they had in store for me. Instead, I now knew every detail, and I was too zoned out to do anything to stop any of it. I watched them pull on their makeshift biohazard coveralls, which were really just snowsuits gathered at the cuffs with duct tape, obviously leftovers from the overindulgent ski vacations required for all rich white boys. “You guys have this down… to a science,” I managed to say. I figured if my smart mouth was going to be shut for me, it might as well have something sharp coming out of it when it happened.