Contents
1 There’s a Sucker Born every Minute
2 The Tarp Guy
3 The Pits
4 What Died?
5 Jesus Wept
6 Bad Lugosi
7 Window-Shopping
8 The Luckiest Vampire on Earth
9 KKK Day
10 Pope Peter the Last
11 The Perfect Pet
12 Slapjack
13 An Ounce of Prevention
14 Kid Stuff
15 The Price of Everything
16 Clarissa
17 Them
18 Ebola
19 Who Knew Buddhists could be so Mean?
20 Night Person Seeks Same
21 The Sex Part
22 32-B
23 Kelly
24 Your Worst Nightmare
25 Out
26 Bull-Something
27 Emergency Sex
28 The Perfect Blue for the Blues
29 Little Bobby Little
30 Guy Stuff
31 The Happy Ending
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by David Sosnowski
Rapture
FREE PRESS
A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
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New York, NY 10020
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2004 by David Sosnowski
All rights reserved,
including the right of reproduction
in whole or in part in any form.
FREEPRESSand colophon are trademarks
of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sosnowski, David.
Vamped : a novel / David Sosnowski.
p. cm.
1. Vampires—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3569.O716 V36 2004
813’.54—dc22 2004046956
ISBN 0-7432-7085-1
Visit us on the World Wide Web:
http://www.SimonSays.com
For my parents,
with gratitude
(again)
If God didn’t want us to eat animals, how come He made ’em out of meat?
—Seen on a bumper sticker,
just outside Detroit
1
There’s a Sucker Born every Minute
Here’s a tip:
When you give the world one last chance to save your life, be specific about thehow. A selection ofA, B, orC would be good, along with a couple of “nots”—to clarify the answers youdon’t want. This is especially important if you’re a vampire and don’t really need to have your life saved,unless…
I’ve come up with this advice by not following it. Which is to say, I began this night—possibly my last—with some vague notion of letting the world take one last shot at keeping me on board. And so I got the answer you get when you leave the world to its own devices.
This:
Me, with a kitchen knife sunk up to the hilt in my guts, while the little brat who’s plunged it there looks on—shivering, hoping, waiting for me to die. The two of us are in the middle of a very big, pine-thick nowhere. She breathes and you can see it; I breathe and you can’t. Neither of us is saying anything at the moment. The pines sigh. Creak. My car, with its door ajar, bing-bings away while the wipers ticktock back and forth under an on-again, off-again rain.
That’s something that hasn’t changed, even if everything else has. It still rains. Snows. Tornadoes still blow houses apart, still drive pieces of straw through two-by-fours. The sun? The sun hasn’t changed, either, as far as I know. It still sets on the just and the unjust alike—even though its rising is only a rumor for most of us.
The knife looks kind of funny stuck there, bobbing up and down with my breathing. Not that I mention this to the kid who stabbed me. She’s just a kid, after all. Areal one, not just aface one. Five, six, tops. And she’s just standing there, squeezing her pink-and-white fists, making fog but nothing else. Not even a peep. Not anymore.
I guess itis a little weird for her. Scary, even. Being stuck in the middle of nowhere, covered with your mom’s just-spilt blood, waiting for some stranger to die. A stranger who happens to be a vampire. Not that being terrified and expiration-dated is any excuse for what she’s done. Not that being cute and blood-covered is going to save her from what she’s got coming. But they do buy her a few more minutes of me letting her sweat as I lie here, not dying.
“That wasn’t very nice,” I say, finally.
And that’s all it takes. Just my saying it is all it takes to make my little fog breather flinch.
And as for me? I guess her flinching will have to do. Her flinching at the sound of a voice that hasn’t scaredanybody in God only knows how long. If that’s what the world’s offering, I’ll take it. For one more night, at least.
Maybe I should back up.
I’ve been feeling a bit down lately. Edgy. Out of sorts.
Suicidal.
I’d call it a midlife crisis, but what does that mean when your life doesn’t have a middle? A lot of vampires go through this sort of thing, right around the time we should be dead from natural causes. I’d say it feels like the flu, but vampires don’t get the flu; they don’t get sick, period. What they get, instead, is bored. You start feeling bored, then moody, and then your skin doesn’t seem to fit, even though it hasn’t changed a bit since you were vamped. Your friends, the ones you personally made immortal to keep you company throughout eternity, areboring. They bore right into your soul, like boll weevils of predictability. You know what each one is going to say before they say it, and when they do, you start thinking about how long forever really is.
But it’s the missing that gets you most. All the things that are no longer part of your life. Like sunlight. Of course. Like chocolate. And cigarettes. A peach—even one of those syrup-embalmed canned ones. The excuse of a bathroom break to get away from your stupid job, or any other part of your stupid life. The feel of the seasons on your skin and in your bones. The sweet relief of stepping out of the cold and into a restaurant, its windows fogged with the warm embrace of different-flavored needs being met. Watching the steam rise from your name, written in yellow in a fresh snowbank, lit blue by a full moon, way past the middle of a night clocked in vodka tonics and shots with dirty names.
And coffee. And coffee. And coffee…
When I’m feeling like this, I find that tits usually help.
Pert and spotlit, naked and alive and bouncing just slightly to the beat of whatever the DJ happens to be playing. It’s a habit I got into long ago, back before the ratio of mortals to vampires flipped—back when some of my benevolent buddies and I decided to help the flip along. We were missionaries of vampirism, and strippers made good apostles. We’d vamp them, they’d vamp their customers, their customers would vamp their wives and loved ones. The whole six-degrees-of-separation thing. Johnny Appleseed, but with fangs.
We called ourselves the Benevolent Vampire Society and our goal was pretty simple: we wanted a little company for our misery. We wanted to vote the other guys out—to be normal, to fall in love again, to live for something other than the next meal. We didn’t want to watch the others around us growing old as we stayed young, reminding us of our open-endedness, and the pitiful little we’d filled it with.
Our motto was pure hubris: “There’s a sucker born every minute.” The problem was, the closer we came to making that true, the more obvious it became thatwe were the real suckers. “Normal�
� meant “tamer.” Vampirism became…domesticated.Industrialized. Commercialized. The hunt for victims and benefactors was replaced by the sorts of jobs we thought we left behind. We had to work for a living again—or after-living, as the case may be. We went from slipping our fangs into nice, juicy necks to filling up grocery bags with name-brand plasma, grown in a vat instead of a vein, made from stem cells and other lab-fresh ingredients. And just like that, we went from being the perfect predators to the perfect consumers—ones with a perfectly understood need that could be perfectly met, forever and ever.
Amen.
So, this vampire walks into a bar…
He doesn’t fly, doesn’t pad in on wolf’s feet, or skitter across the sad linoleum with clicking little rat nails. He doesn’t steam in through the keyhole, or crawl foggily under the door.Real vampires don’t go in for such special effects—partly because wecan’t —and so a bipedal entrance will have to do.
He’s decided to give himself up to the night—maybe his last—with an open (but empty) heart.
That’s the way my evening started. In that kind of mood, making those kinds of decisions. It didn’t take long to see the error of my ways.
By the way, if you want to get a feeling for how much the world’s changed, just go to a vampire strip club. If it wasn’t for the poor lighting, the bouncers, and the half-naked women, you’d swear you’d stepped into a grade school from before. They’re not really kids, of course; some of them are older than I am, and I’m not just talking about my face age. We call them Screamers, and you’ll know why if you ever set one off. Each one is a frozen tragedy, their vamping coming before their bodies reached the right age to spend forever in—kids with leukemia or some other fatal disease for which vamping was the only hope. And now they’re stuck, and pissed. You’ll see them sulking around the malls at midnight, children’s bodies carrying their adult-sized souls, the wrinkles on their foreheads never quite setting, but not for lack of trying. I like to think of them as munchkins from the bad side of Oz—ones with very rich vocabularies when it comes to your anatomy and the many painful uses to which it can be put.
Strip clubs are one of the few places where Screamers don’t—scream,that is. Theysmile , instead, trying to look cute, trying to kiss up to whatever vague, maternal instinct the dancers may harbor in their wholly vestigial (though fetching) breasts. They come in with bankrolls bigger than they are and blow it all on reverse lap dances, straddling the dancer’s leg with their stubby little ones, bouncing up and down, slapping their stunted manhood against bare thigh over and over again in a very adult game of horsey.
I look at the horny grade school surrounding me and feel even more depressed than I did before coming in. I look up and see myself in one of the bar’s many mirrors. You know that thing about vampires not having a reflection? Myth. Vampires reflect all the time. In mirrors. In chrome. In their lonelier moments. Like me. Like now.
What a face I’ve got. What a mug I’ve been saddled with for all eternity. It always looks a little sad, a little tired, a little like it’s been through the wringer a few too many times. It’s the sort of face that women find compelling, I’ve been told. I think it’s because I look experienced, like I’ve been through that wringer and survived. It’s my eyes, that’s what does it. They’re standard-issue vampire eyes—all black, matching my short-shorn hair, my mood. What’s different is their prominence, their hyperthyroid eagerness, as if my mere skull were having a hard time keeping them in. They’re the eyes of someone who listens, sympathizes, bleeds with every tragedy that’s related to him across candlelit tables. The rest of my face is baby smooth, innocent, deceptively safe—the perfect face for a vampire who needs to get in close before dinner.
The other baby faces—the ones with shorter legs—are starting to get rowdy. I check out the glasses on the table next to me, fogged with condensation. That’s another big difference with the vampire version of these kinds of places—the heat. While the old clubs cranked up the AC to keep the dancers’ nipples hard, our kind work just the opposite. We’re cold-blooded, just like lizards, which really means that our blood’s notcold so much as room temperature. And like a lizard basking on a sunny rock, the way to get ushot is to get us hot. That’s why vampire sex usually starts with a trip to the shower, or a good crank of the thermostat to the right. That’s also why the air swims around our apartment buildings on cold Saturday nights. The excess heat of steaming showers and cranked thermostats coming from dozens of apartments makes the air watery, makes the moon behind it ripple like a reflection in a puddle. If you’re quiet, you may hear the moans and groans, the occasional howl or bark of vampire delight, but these are just the grace notes. It’s the heat that tells the story, all that vampire love shimmering in the cold night air.
Like they say, all’s Fahrenheit in love and war.
Being good businesspeople, the owners of vampire strip clubs take full advantage of their clientele’s biological predictability. Steadily throughout the evening, they turn up the heat as the customers get more and more worked up, spending more and more money on blood and lap dances. By last call, the place is like a sauna. Already warm glasses of blood begin to sweat. Watch crystals go blurry. And every time some bowlegged munchkin goes stumbling for the exit, a steamy swirl of fog follows him out.
And then there are the bartenders.
Or rather, there’s thelack of bartenders. I’ve never gotten over that, there being no actual bar or bartenders in vampire bars, whether strip, gay, sport, classy, divey, or whatever. No one to chew the fat with, to spill your guts to, to cut you off when you’ve had too much. Oh, they’ve got bouncers, and video cameras, and someone at the door to check your coat, charge you the cover, point out a table if one’s not obvious, but no actualbar, or anyone tending it. No need, really. There’s only the one drink—the “housevin” —and self-serve is just more cost effective. So, instead of bartenders or waitresses, each table has a metered tap that’s pretty useless when it comes to spilling your guts. But theydo accept coins and bills and credit cards, all for your convenience.
When they’re working, that is.
When you don’t try feeding them a twenty that’s been out of circulation since before the change, only to find out, now that it’s too late, that it’s all you’ve got. And so you keep shoving it in and the slot keeps spitting it back, Andrew Jackson’s too-small face mocking grimly. You flatten it out, straighten the corners, crease it down the middle, and still you get that mechanical whir of rejection.
The other patrons begin turning in their seats, their stubby little legs not reaching the floor. They look at you with their black-marble crow eyes. They look at you likeyou’re the loser. They don’t know it’s a last-straw night. They don’t know that you’re one of the people who’s responsible for what they are, for where they are, for what the world’s become.
Shove. Whir.
Please. Fuck. Dammit. Shit…
And so there you are, in a vampire strip club, surrounded by nonscreaming Screamers, shouting at a machine that won’t listen to reason. The half-naked women onstage have stopped dancing and are looking at you with that no-chance-in-hell look, that not-worth-the-trouble sideways stare. And out of nowhere, you find yourself thinking about Paul Newman inCool Hand Luke. No, not the “failure to communicate” scene, but the one right at the beginning where he’s cutting the heads off parking meters, just before all the trouble starts. And that’s when you get the idea, the one that makes you smile to yourself. The one that makes you think:
A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do…
It’s not until after things start getting broken that it occurs to you—perhaps too late—that libido is not the only thing that rises with the heat.
I’m asked to leave.
I’m cut off before I was even on.
On the night I’ve given the world one last chance to save my life, I’m asked by a bouncer who’d be dust now if it wasn’t for me and my benevolent brethren. I—Martin Ko
walski, Vampire, Esquire, founding member of the BVS and cocreator of the world, such as it is—Iamasked toleave.
Okay.
Okay, and fuck you.Fuck this.
After the steam of my exit dissipates, I notice that it’s raining. That’s one thing that hasn’t changed, I think. It still rains. Snows. Tornadoes still…
The valet brings my car around with the wipers already going. He looks at me like I’m one of those guys who pops his cork a minute and a half into his first lap dance. He lets the keys drop into my palm to avoid any accidental contact. He exits the vehicle with hands retracted, full of second thoughts about having touched whatever I’ve touched. He’s judging me. I can see that by the way he holds his lips, the little bit of fang he lets show. I’m being judged by someone who’ll probably be making minimum wage for all of eternity.
DSosnowski - Vamped Page 1