Lucas leaned into my ear. “Because
I know what you are
, Joe…
I know
. Haven’t you been getting my e-mails?”
Shitfuckdamn.
They weren’t from Lazer.
I knew that prick wouldn’t keep his mouth shut. “You went to all this trouble – you actually paid Lazer
money
– just to get to me because I’m a vampire?”
Lucas shook his head. “It wasn’t all about you, Joe; you’re an unexpected bonus. Sloppy seconds in the hunt for vampires, if you want to think of it that way. And Lazer was really just a pin in the map. Originally we were gunning for someone else. Show him, Kyle. Dim the light so he can see.” Kyle turned down the light, and unlatched a heavy metal box about the size of a lunch pail that reminded me of something I’d read in a book about serial killers, and how they’d carry around pieces of their victims… Kyle turned the box over, and the contents fell out at my feet with a thick splash.
And here’s where things got a little grisly for my taste.
Staring up at me from the floor, fangs bared and hair extensions in a matted web all around, was Don’s head.
It was semi-decomposed and coated with some kind of slimy fluid, like they had tried to preserve it somehow. The smell was horrendous. There was enough expression left on his face to see that whatever they had done to him before he died had been terrifying. I could feel myself heaving beneath the straps, but something inside of me wouldn’t let me look away from him, no matter how much I wanted to. I think I needed to see him, to look directly into the very literal face of my own coming fate. I’d gone from denying the vampire pieces entirely to letting them take me over for a while to striking a delicate accord with them and finally achieving balance. And here was Don, who may have ended up on the wrong side of his own vampire-to-human ratio, but he certainly hadn’t started out there. He was still a human being despite whatever vampirizing he’d been through.
And now, we’d be coming to the same end.
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 practically 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.