by C. T. Phipps
STRAIGHT OUTTA FANGTON
Book One of The Straight Outta Fangton Series
By C. T. Phipps
A Macabre Ink Production
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Digital Edition Copyright © 2016 C. T. Phipps
LICENSE NOTES
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Meet the Author
C.T. Phipps is a lifelong student of horror, science fiction, and fantasy. An avid tabletop gamer, he discovered this passion led him to write and turned him into a lifelong geek. He is a regular blogger and also a reviewer for The United Federation of Charles.
Bibliography
Agent G: Infiltrator (Agent G #1)
Agent G: Saboteur (Agent G #2)
Agent G: Assassin (Agent G #3) – Coming Spring of 2018
Straight Outta Fangton (The United States of Monsters Series #1)
I was a Teenage Weredeer (The United States of Monsters Series #2)
An American Weredeer in Michigan (The United States of Monsters Series #3)
Cthulhu Armageddon (Cthulhu Armageddon Series #1)
The Tower of Zhaal (Cthulhu Armageddon Series #2)
Running Free (Cyberpunk Wars #1) – Coming Spring of 2018
Lucifer’s Star (Lucifer’s Star #1)
Lucifer’s Nebula (Lucifer’s Star #2)
The Rules of Supervillainy (Supervillainy Saga #1)
The Games of Supervillainy (Supervillainy Saga #2)
The Secrets of Supervillainy (Supervillainy Saga #3)
The Science of Supervillainy (Supervillainy Saga #4)
The Tournament of Supervillainy (Supervillainy Saga #5) – Coming Summer of 2018
The Universe of Supervillainy (Supervillainy Saga #6) – Coming Winter of 2018
Esoterrorism (Red Room Vol. 1)
Eldritch Ops. (Red Room Vol. 2) – Coming Summer of 2018
The Divine Source (Steampunk Fantastica #1) – Coming Summer of 2018
Wraith Knight (Wraith Knight #1)
Wraith Lord (Wraith Knight #2) – Coming Spring of 2018
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STRAIGHT OUTTA FANGTON
Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Epilogue
Introduction
I love me some vampires.
I began my love affair with the undead with The Lost Boys on television when I was ten years old. They were unlike the images of vampires I'd had in the back of my head from cultural osmosis. They were cool, they were nasty, and they were rebellious.
Later, I would become a fan of Anne Rice's creations and for the next decade would enjoy just about anything vampire related: The Blade Trilogy, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Dresden Files, From Dusk Till Dawn, Fever Dream, Forever Knight, John Carpenter's Vampires, Near Dark, Necroscope, True Blood, Underworld, Vampire: The Masquerade, and even the Anita Blake novels before they turned into erotica.
But unfortunately, vampires lost some of their cultural panache, partly because the romantic vampire genre has portrayed so many bloodsuckers as merely harmlessly eccentric. This isn't to dis the romantic vampire—it's a trope for a reason—but the trope started to occupy the majority of headspace in fans’ minds. People forgot that vampires, as cool and sexy as they might sometimes be, are monsters.
This doesn't mean there hasn't been some great vampire fiction in recent years. Byzantium, Only Lovers Left Alive, and What We Do in the Shadows are some of my favorite vampire movies of all time. I'm also of the mind that the vampire will never die as a creature, the same way the superhero will continue being a major part of our cultural heritage well into the twenty-first century. They're just too good a metaphor for too many things.
Straight Outta Fangton is my attempt to throw my hat into the world of the undead. When Crossroad Press contacted me about doing a series for them, I was pleasantly surprised. I was just off working on my existing series in The Rules of Supervillainy and wanted to do something different. Having written a book that sends up all the tropes of superheroes and their bizarre relationship with the world while telling a serious, coherent story, I thought I'd do the same for the Nosferatu.
I don't think I send up this genre quite as successfully because the vampire is fundamentally a terrifying figure, but I think it's still pretty damn entertaining.
Special thanks to my wife Kat, Jeffrey Kafer, Jim Bernheimer, Mike Gibson, and others who helped me bring this project to fruition.
Chapter One
“Who ever heard of a vampire working at a goddamn 7-Eleven?” I muttered, standing there fiddling with the Slurpee machine.
Technically, it wasn't a 7-Eleven. It was a Qwik & Shop, which basically amounted to the same thing and was the fifth sort of this business in this location. You'd think the owners would have clued into the fact this particular road thirty minutes off the highway wasn't the best place to put such a store.
I was dressed in a green apron and doing double duty restocking the shelves and working the counter since my partner, David, was doing approximately jack and shit to help me. David Treme was a reasonably good-looking blond-haired Caucasian man who was presently doing his “Randal from Clerks” impression by reading a porn magazine as I did his job for him. This was doubly ridiculous because he was technically my slave.
Heavy on the “technically.”
“Hell, Peter, who ever heard of a Black vampire?” David said, not bothering to look up.
I stopped struggling wi
th the Slurpee machine. “There have been plenty of Black vampires.”
“Name four.”
“Eddie Murphy in Vampire in Brooklyn, Aaliyah in Queen of the Damned, Blade, and Blacula.”
“Blade is a half-breed; he doesn't count.”
“Hey hey, can it with the racism,” I said, frowning. “Some of us started as half-breeds.”
David lowered his magazine. “Speaking of which, when are we going to seal the deal?”
I grimaced. “Could you not call it that?”
“What? You'd prefer I term it something more erotic? I thought all vampires were bisexual.”
I blinked once. “No, David.”
“Well, that's disappointing.”
I sighed. “Well, we're all learning new things about our condition, aren't we?”
When Thoth had approached me about the possibility of becoming a vampire, he'd more or less made it sound like becoming undead would be one long party. Since the Great Economic Collapse when the Vampire Nation had bailed out the country, vampires had moved back from friendly body-glitter types to ruthless sexy badasses again. Thoth, who lived a life between Jay Z’s and Dracula’s, certainly made it work.
Thoth might have mentioned I was expected to work his way up from the bottom and make my own fortune, though. Honestly, there were times I regretted his making me a vampire. I didn't have any problem with the liquid diet, vulnerability to sunlight, or occasional homicidal urges, but being his servant had come with the perks. Now I was back to the same sort of work I'd been doing before Iraq, especially since my exile from New Detroit.
“I'm just saying, I'm ready for the next step.” David shrugged his shoulders. “How long have we been friends?”
“Too long by my estimation,” I said, giving up on fixing the Slurpee machine.
“So maybe it's time you made me undead.”
“You've only been my servant for a few months, David.”
“That's long enough.”
I rolled my eyes and went back to the cash register, biting my tongue about how I'd been Thoth's servant for four years. David knew that and didn't care. I decided, instead, to point out the systemic concerns. “It's a bit more complicated than just changing whoever I want. Population control is a big thing among the undead. After the explosion following the Bailout, they've seriously been cracking down on the creation of new vampires. Any one of us who changes a mortal without the local voivode’s permission gets killed.”
“Isn't that illegal?” David said, finally paying attention. “I mean, we’re United States citizens and all.”
“The half of the Supreme Court owned by vampires holds the rights of the VN sacred while the other half approves of anything that gets more vampires killed.”
I turned to the seventy-year-old across the counter who'd been waiting for her Slurpee. “I'm sorry, but the machine is busted. Can I get you anything else?”
The woman sniffed the air before grabbing her handbag. “You realize you're going to Hell.” It was statement rather than a question.
I paused, wondering if I should respond to the old bat. “Yes. Yes, I do.”
The woman stomped out, forgetting her debit card.
I picked her card up and slipped it into the lost and found, not bothering to go after her. “Can you believe that?”
“Speaking as a bisexual man, yes,” David said, shrugging. “Don't take this the wrong way, but I'm actually kind of glad you guys are the new target for the Religious Right.”
“And you still want to be a vampire.”
“I figure immortality and the ability to fly would make up for it.”
“I just kind of float,” I muttered. “That's another thing they don't mention. It turns out all of those awesome powers you see in movies take time to develop, as in centuries, and aren't nearly as cool as you’d think.”
“Floating is cool.”
“Hypnosis would be better.”
“Isn't that like rape?” David asked, tapping the Slurpee machine and making himself a Green TurboblastTM.
“What?” I said, appalled.
“You know, hypnotizing women into letting you drain their blood.”
“Hell no! I mean, yes, but I wouldn't do it for that. I mean for, like, uh, convincing people to give me money or sending away my creditors.”
“Isn't that like theft?”
“You're a real killjoy, David.”
I was spared further conversation by Steve, the other useless employee at the Qwik & Shop, who was coming back from the bathroom. He was a six foot one, thin, pale man with long black hair, sunken eyes, and bad teeth who dressed like he'd raided Russell Brand's closet and not washed for a month.
Steve Emerson was a werewolf, something I'd only found out a month into working here when he'd dropped dead for three hours before spontaneously reviving as the police were carting him off. Apparently, resurrection was their thing unless it involved wolfsbane. Though Steve was testing it with every conceivable illicit substance known to man.
“Hey,” Steve said, walking up to us and staring at us.
David and I exchanged a glance.
A few moments passed.
“Uh, Steve?” I asked.
“Yeah?” Steve said.
“You want to move on down?” I asked, not caring where he went as long as it was away from me.
“I have something to tell you,” Steve said.
I really hoped it was that he was quitting, but suspected he'd forget even if he did. Then again, it wouldn't make sense for him to quit since he was my boss. Yes, Steve was the manager, and not me. Goddammit, how far had I fallen that I gave a shit about that? I was actually starting to miss Baghdad.
“What is it?” David asked.
“Don't encourage him,” I said. “He's on meth right now.”
“Heroin, cocaine, bath salts, PCP, and several new pharmaceutical concoctions,” Steve said, smiling. “It's a well-balanced mixture all canceling each other out.”
“Jesus,” David said. “How are you not dead again?”
I flinched at the name Jesus, which was awkward since I was still nominally Christian and hadn't taken the whole “vampires are damned before God” thing all that seriously. It had also altered my swearing, as I could take the Lord’s name in vain but not actually call to him. “Actually, I'd be more concerned about how Steve is able to afford all the shit he puts in his system.”
“I'm a millionaire,” Steve said. “My great-great grandmother was Betty Crocker.”
“I'm pretty sure Betty Crocker wasn't a werewolf,” I said. “We’d have been able to taste the difference.”
David, however, bought it hook, line, and sinker. “Why are you working here, then?”
“Because I spend all my money on drugs,” Steve said, shrugging. “Anyway, you and David are like gay vampires, right?”
“You're about half-right,” I said, remembering another reason why I disliked Steve.
“About the vampire or the—” Steve started to say.
“Just tell us what you wanted to say,” I said. I wondered how much of Steve's addled-drug-user act was just that—an act.
Steve stuck his thumb over his shoulder and gestured back at the bathrooms. “There's a dead girl in the bathroom.”
I blinked.
So did David.
“You might have opened with that,” I said, pulling out my cellphone to call the cops. “Any sign of how she died?”
“Well, she's getting back up,” Steve said, shrugging. He grabbed a candy bar from the front rack and started eating it in front of me.
I stopped dialing my cellphone. “Are you going to pay for that?”
“No,” Steve said, chewing as he talked.
“So she's a werewolf?” David asked, all too fascinated by all this.
“No, she's one of your kind,” Steve said. “That's why I brought it up. I figure when she wakes up, she's going to probably kill whoever goes in the ladies room, so we should probably lock her up until da
ylight and then then drag her out into the road.”
“You can't do that!” I said, horrified. “That's murder.”
“Can't kill what's already dead,” Steve said, finishing his candy bar and dropping the wrapper on the ground. “No offense.”
“Quite a bit taken,” I said, appalled.
I tried to think of who could be so horrifyingly reckless and stupid to turn a mortal in the bathroom and then abandon them to whatever fate awaited them. Vampires tended to awaken extremely hungry, Steve wasn't wrong about that, and the local police had a “shoot first, never ask questions” policy when dealing with the undead. It was like being Black with a little more Black. Believe you me.
Searching my memories of the customers who'd come in the past couple of hours, I couldn't think of anyone who particularly stood out. Then again, that was kind of the point of being a vampire—we didn't look any different from anyone else. The inhuman beauty and pale skin thing was another invention of Hollywood, one for which I was very grateful.
“David, I need you to get all the security feeds for tonight,” I said, taking off my apron and getting the spare key for the women's bathroom.
“You sure I should be—” David started to argue.
“Do it!” I snapped and exercised my will.
David's eyes widened and he immediately went to work, following my command. I immediately felt guilty about doing that to my friend, but this was a situation where it was justified. I hadn't been kidding about vampires and population control. It was generally agreed that there should only be one vampire for every hundred thousand humans, and given New Detroit had about two thousand Undead Americans, that wasn't exactly working out.
The Old Ones in the Vampire Nation, as a result, had made a not-so-unofficial decree that there was to be some serious population pruning. Anyone not over the age of a hundred was to be killed for the slightest offense. It had worked, after a fashion, since this had immediately resulted in the majority of people my age plotting ways they could off the Old Ones. I’d even fought in the Network Riots that had gotten a lot of my friends killed—I’d also fought on the Old Ones’ side. None of that boded well for the girl in the bathroom's survival.