by Ted Minkinow
“Now,” I said.
This time they moved. I turned all of my attention on the thing that had just devoured several hanks of my hide and who’d demonstrated every intention of eating me alive until the alive part ended…the uninvited beast whose presence threatened my friends and the secrecy, and thus continuation, of the life I’d cobbled for myself in Germany, at the disgusting thing who chewed meat with his mouth open.
“I,” I said, “will rip your face off.” A pause, “And shove it where hellfire doesn’t shine.”
The first part, I intended on fulfilling. The second, just a bluff…an American colloquialism. Long Face still wore that shocked look, though it morphed just a bit. Instead of the blank face of the completely baffled, he wore the expression of a German who’d seen my dog crap on the sidewalk and me not pausing to retrieve the sculpture.
Good. My threat got through to him. You know how I said demons show no rational fear? Long Face could be the poster boy for that truism. He snarled and produced a dagger from under his coat.
Abra-ca-freekin’-dabra.
Long, black metal, curved. Big deal. Long Face didn’t know I had the twin of his pig-sticker embedded in my lung not more than four hours previous. Uncomfortable? Yes. Slow me down? A little. Make me miss out on ripping a demon’s face off his head and shoving it up his keister? Never.
Long Face rushed me. Maybe an over-the-top literary word for what happened, it’s just the more accurate “walked awkwardly toward me” doesn’t sound sufficiently action-oriented. And it would have been funny had death not sat in the equation. Still though, it was the same kind of girly sliding waddle women use when wearing those tight, two-sizes-too-small, full-length evening gowns.
Defense isn’t my specialty. I’m good enough at it, but my boiling blood insisted on taking the offensive. That means I rushed Long Face—rushed is no literary exaggeration this time because I moved like a scalded-butt monkey. No evening dress for me.
Duress tends to supercharge the brain…make it more efficient. Despite the short distance between Long Face and me, and an acceleration on my part that would make a formula one driver jealous, I analyzed many and varying scenarios for the face rip. In retrospect I’ve named it the 50 Ways to Leave Your Demon engagement. Yeah I know, I’ve already used that Paul Simon song. You’ll probably hear me use it again.
I arrived first. You may be wondering how someone can arrive first when two people are moving toward each other. I still arrived first…I can’t stand losing a race and I did not lose that one. Long Face reached for my throat. Do they spend any time at all practicing on the Judo mats at demon certification school?
I ducked his paw and the knife it contained and slammed my fist into where a sternum should be. If I know nothing about physiology, I know less about what holds a demon’s guts together. My choice of a fist landing zone seemed OK because it threw Long Face several yards down the corridor. The knife flew even further. Long Face did the comic slide thing with his butt and the back of his head touching pavement. Safe!
He remained down while I walked toward him to continue the part of the night that would end in me ripping the face off the thing that wanted to eat me. Notice I said walk? No more running this way or that. No reason. As I said, I’d already won the race.
You know that demons don’t display fear when they should. Education is a good thing. You can quote me. How are fear and education linked? Long Face was about to find out because he’d won a free training course on identifying appropriate scenarios for fear. He’d thank me someday.
I tried my best to loom as I stood over Long Face. And it looked like I was getting through to him because old Long Face tried a kick to my Rocky Mountain oysters. Juvenile move in a desperate situation. Since most of my dates end with a knee to my crotch, my reaction came swiftly and automatically. When a chick practices punting with your footballs you step aside, make an apology, and yell goodnight loud enough for her receding form to hear as she flees. It’s different with a demon.
No need to step aside. The approved solution is to grab the offending foot. Pull it close, and snap the leg at the kneecap—in the opposite direction it bends. Unlike his departed associate of the six legs, Long Face possessed the more typical two. He screamed loud enough to shake dust out of the knotholes dotting the plywood walls. Good. He was beginning to get the fear thing and I felt the same tingling of satisfied pride a teacher must feel when a student catches on to an elusive concept.
“You wanted to eat me?”
I think I was screaming too because more dust floated down from the walls and the ceiling. Long Face didn’t respond in words, but the look on his face said everything. No more surprise, no more arrogance. I saw anger. They say anger and fear are two sides of the same coin—or maybe I just made it up. No matter the source, I decided to give the coin a flip and see if it landed on heads—anger—or tails—fear.
“Well then take a bite.”
I kicked my right leg—my aching, missing a pound of flesh right leg—out and drove my elbow through Long Face’s jaw. My weight combined nicely with my vampire strength and I felt whatever structure holding his mouth together powder under the force. Somehow my elbow ended up embedded a couple of inches into the concrete. No worries at all. I rolled over to my knees.
Long Face did not move. He kept his eyes on me alright but eyeballs were the only indication he was still with us. I’d like to think I saw pleas for mercy in those eyes. If so, the mercy department closed at five. He’d need to leave a message at the beep.
One demon face obliterated beneath the eyes. Nice. Long Face writhing in agony. Nicer. The time had come for a pop test to gauge student progression. Pen and paper weren’t handy so I made it an oral test. Too bad my student had no mouth. A bit shortsighted on my part perhaps but I thought I could work around the issue. I bent nearer to the place where Long Face used to have a mouth. I brought my voice down to a whisper.
“Did that taste good or do you prefer more leg of vampire?”
No response though I’m certain he found my elbow a bit too bony.
“What did I promise?” I said.
Again, no answer. To be fair to Long Face he was in no position to speak. My question wasn’t quite rhetorical, though I already had the answer. I spread my palm over his face and I felt the sharpness of my extended teeth as they waited for action near my chin.
The hunter came forward to join the vampire and I’m ashamed to say it was the vampire that added sublime joy to the mixture. No mercy. Not tonight. Not for a demon.
My hand came down hard with fingers extended. Long Face finally rewarded my teaching efforts with a look of abject terror. Graduation time. That expression lasted less than a blink because I knifed my fingers into Long Face’s eye sockets. He moaned. I groped inside to find proper leverage and I pulled upward with a clean, powerful jerk.
The result sounded more like a rifle shot than it did a dry stick broken in two. I was on my knees in the temporary construction tunnel at the Bad Homburg main train station. And I was holding a demon’s face. Well, not the whole thing, but enough of the major components that I could pass an audit. Long Face went still.
I considered turning him over to deposit the pieces into the proper orifice, but decided a demon butt was a thing best kept covered. As the saying goes, less was definitely more. I threw the parts aside and stood up to evaluate my handiwork. My vampire engines were already braking and a small measure of sickness rose in my throat when I saw how completely I’d taken the demon apart.
Long Face—if I could call him that anymore...No Face seemed more appropriate—remained alive in whatever way demons live. Alive yes, but he could kiss his acting career goodbye. He’d just have to face the facts. You know, puns aren’t just for breakfast anymore.
Call me insensitive to the plight of suffering demons but I had my reasons. I needed to reverse all engines before turning to face my friends because, if I could calm my vampire thing, then the teeth would retract. The proce
ss took about a minute, and timing started as soon the anger ended. It must have been a vampire who invented the line about laughter being the best medicine.
I felt the disobedient buggers returning to base camp. No way for sure to know how much time we had before No Face did the Lazarus thing and we started the deadly tango back up. I didn’t think we’d see the rest of the demon horde again because I felt certain their calendars were stuffed with appointments to commit mayhem in several additional locations before daybreak. Demons work hard when it comes to terrorizing those they feel are weaker. That makes them kind of human.
My friends behind me hadn’t moved from the moment I vaporized No Face’s jaw with my elbow. I can only guess as to how much easier things would have been if Sister Christian and company had run away when the squad of demons departed and left the main event to No Face and me.
Ripping the creature’s face off by the eye sockets should have impressed them…in the worst of ways. An even chorus of shallow breathing was all I heard behind me. And my darn teeth remained extended beyond my lips. No way to cover them without making an exaggerated mean-man face. So I concentrated on funny.
Like a knife in the back. No. Like one of The Seven playing basketball with my pink body inside my own house. No. Like a surprise attack by a mostly-naked but unabatedly stinky thousand year old Hungarian amazon. Better. Like a cabal of demons using my body for a party favorite. Getting there. Like the look on Sparky’s face when I showed up still living and breathing and with most of my important parts intact. Right path. Like the look on Sparky’s face when I put both hands around his neck and squeezed him like a plastic bottle of catsup. Hilarious.
Well, not really all that funny but the time it took to cycle through all the possibilities worked out well for me. My face looked like Gare Teutoberg once more. And that wasn’t much to brag about.
“Let’s go,” I said as I turned toward my friends.
They didn’t move. It’s difficult to fully describe what I saw in their faces, in their stances. I looked like Gare to them—maybe a few pounds lighter thanks to No Face—but I don’t think I WAS Gare to them. Not anymore. I saw what a chimpanzee might see from his side of the bars. I don’t think it would have surprised them if I’d jumped up and grabbed a cross beam, swung a couple of times, and peed all over them. Maybe they stood there waiting to dodge a poop ball I’d send their way.
“It’s me,” I said. “Let’s get out of here.”
“Who is me,” responded southern-accent J-Rod, and it came out as a statement, not a question. An accusation.
“Me is me,” I responded.
Sister Christian seemed to understand because she nodded. Good thing because I had no clue what I was talking about. Proof enough I really was me. I tried a different approach.
“He’s going to get back up,” I said.
They all knew I meant No Face. It’s a credit to their suspension of disbelief that they didn’t run out of the tunnel screaming like they’d just spotted Super Rumble naked. They looked down at No Face. Well, I think the Prince only pretended to look, but I didn’t hold it against him because it demonstrated his solidarity with the bagger gang.
A few minutes earlier my friends returned to this stupid plywood tunnel to offer up their lives in my defense. Now they weren’t sure they ever knew me. Maybe it was time to start that walk to nowhere. I took a hesitant step in the direction away from town. Away from my apartment, my bagging job, the greedy Herr Doktor and his somewhat Frau. Away from the two biggest pains in my neck—Helmet and Karl—who provided more delight and reason to come home than I’d felt in decades.
Most of all, those steps would take me away from my bagger gang—J-Rod the fake Hispanic, Watanabe the Japanese wannabe, Bonny Prince McDonald of the Kingdom of the Ocularly Challenged, and my darling Sister Christian. I was walking out on the first life I’d found peace in since the passing of my precious Nellie. She’d expect me to stay and explain things…thought people could love me for who I was, not hate me for what I was. Like she did.
I was walking out on everything precious to me as I headed for the exit that led to the parking lot filled with cars to somewhere else. And I knew my friends would all be better off without me.
Chapter 18
“Quit pouting.”
Sister Christian’s voice. I kept walking, and wondered whether that sentence from the free-spirited fifty-something hippie represented her max level of tough love or a full blown intervention.
“We can follow you for however long it takes for you to stop and talk this out.”
Maybe tough love.
“We can also catch you and hold you down until you hear what we have to say.”
The pendulum swung back to intervention…seasoned with tough love. They could neither catch up to me nor could they hold me down. But I wouldn’t stand on technicalities. I stopped and turned. I also checked on No Face. Just my luck to let my pity party make me forget about the main threat and leave the people I brought into this whole mess open to a new attack from some faceless enemy.
No trace of No Face. Try saying that five times. I’ve heard that demons tend to physically disappear when they lose. Neat trick. And you will never catch them in the act. Perhaps they don’t care to stick around for the trophy presentation to the winning team.
Emotions goad people into stupidity. Another quote from me. Was it pure emotion that begged me to turn around and rejoin the baggers…to pretend like nothing happened? No. That would represent stupidity. Stay with me, folks.
I could have kicked in the afterburners and left the gang behind, but they deserved more than that out of me. And what would they think? They’d witnessed more crazy impossibilities in five minutes than a billion average humans will see in a lifetime. I could leave them to interpret things however they wanted.
What then? What if one or more of them couldn’t keep their mouths shut? What if the incredible things they saw—the demons with loose humanoid forms, No Face eating me alive, the supernatural fight—put so much stress on their sanity they needed to tell someone? If only to relieve the pressure. What then? Forever the crackpot label? Institutionalization? Would they end up believing their soft minds made the whole thing up? Here’s what they risked: ruined lives.
Those thoughts coalesced into a kind of muddy impediment to walking. The running in a dream thing. The gang took a couple of steps toward me. Tentative, not the running-through-a-sunny-meadow-into-a-group-hug type of steps. Did I really want to lead them deeper into my shadow world?
No honest answer existed, though my heart said yes. If I weren’t a vampire and therefore immersed in an alternate society with players as foreign to normal people as honesty is to a politician, then my friends would not have felt compelled to participate in a demon near-orgy. So by virtue of showing up I’d already brought them into it.
But I couldn’t just not show up. I’ve already said that vampires live in an alternate society. That’s probably too grand a description. Alternate society sounds like different planet. Not true. More accurate to say vampires all belong to an exclusive club. And because of our natural repugnance to each other, think of the club as more virtual than physical. Oh, and it’s exclusive because only a few hundred of us exist.
So here’s where I’m going with this: If I’m to have any life at all, it’s going to be among the non-infected, not other vampires. That might sound selfish, and it probably is. But would you rather have super-human killing machines running around that are also emotionally maladjusted and socially inept? Well, other than me, that is.
The gang took another step. I’m making it sound like they were marching or dancing toward me. Good. Because they were doing some manner of tentative movement in unison. But even a snail eventually gets to where they’re going and I knew my decision—should I stay or should I go—would need firming up in a few seconds.
J-Rod must have realized he looked kind of stupid doing the Electric Slide in that dark tunnel. He shrugged his shoulders
and picked up his return-from-grocery-delivery pace. I couldn’t help the smile forming on my face.
The Blood Feud was just the vehicle, a metaphorical tank blasting away at my cover story. What really exposed both my friends and me was the person declaring the feud. And when I followed the mental back trail, I came upon the image of Sparky. Laughing maniacally while he took a flamethrower to everything dear to me.
Sparky with that old knife-in-back trick. Sparky, the target of Soyla. Sparky, who seemed to expect the demons and who managed to get away before any bleeding commenced. Sparky, who’d somehow gotten one of The Seven to put in a personal appearance at my flat. Sparky, who’d surely committed an act so monumental in idiocy that powerful people—or things—wanted him erased. Sparky. Sparky. Sparky. The rest of my autobiography could likely be written with endless repetitions of Sparky.
Not all Sparky, though. Another player existed. And I wanted to get my hands on her. Sarah Arias. But then, who wouldn’t want to get their hands on her? Sarah Arias owed explanations. Important questions not only to me but now to the continued existence of my friends. Why the sudden popping into our group after months of casual disregard? And on that particular night. How did she influence one of The Seven to back down? How could she see Karl and Helmet? Why did the demons attack shortly after she left the gang? And. Would she consider foregoing the group thing next weekend for a private date?
Sarah Arias. I wanted answers.
Chicks hug each other and cry in these kinds of situations. Guys don’t know what to do. Shaking hands would seem formal and a bit awkward. Heaven knows I wouldn’t even consider hugging J-Rod. We sort of looked at each other while the others gathered around.
“Hey homey,” Latino J-Rod said. “Who the dude you rip the face off, man?”
Outstanding question. I wanted to answer with the truth but thought the truth might get my friends into even more danger. How do you make up a lie sufficient enough to glaze over demons of various sizes and shapes—some remotely human-looking, others who could never fit that category. Did enough nuggets of verbal misdirection exist to explain a demon taking bites of my flesh and then me getting off the ground to KO the crowd? Probably not. And there was my teeth. A good liar would need a career day. Sister Christian stepped in.