Unmade: A Neo-Nihilist Vampire Tale (24 page)

            The
Old Soldier paused, thinking and pulled one of his beauties out of his pocket,
lighting it with match. He didn’t seem to know what to say.

            “C’mon,
we gotta get going. The sun’s gonna be up soon, and we haven’t even crossed the
bridge yet.”

            The
Old Soldier made like he was going to take a step and then he paused… “I’m not
going. You’re on your own now, kid. You got it in you to do this on your own.
You ain’t human anymore… you’re a monster.”

            He
could see that it had taken the Old Soldier an amazing amount of strength to
say what he had to say, but that didn’t lessen the pain of the blow. For a
second, he just stood there watching the Old Soldier puff on his beauty, making
little flares of orange light and filling the air with wisps of smoke that
danced away from his lips like breath in the winter… only these stayed, these
lingered.

            “Alright
then. I guess that’s that. I’d rather you stay, but if you don’t have the heart
for it… what am I gonna do?”

            He
leaned against the wall and let the Old Soldier finish his cigarette. “Do you
wish you’d never found me?”

            The
Old Soldier inhaled like an asthmatic, shaky and constricted… “Kid, I wish I
had just left you there to die. It’s what you wanted, it’s what you should have
had. You don’t belong in this world anymore, and if I knew what you were going
to become I would have driven a stake through your heart on the spot.” The Old
Soldier finished up his beauty and held out his hand, “I guess this is the part
where we go our own ways.”

            He
returned the Old Soldier’s handshake even though he felt like crying… almost.
“If you change your mind, you know where to find me.”

            “You
ain’t got to worry about that kid. I got to get out of this place.” The Old
Soldier turned around to go in the opposite direction and that’s when he
grabbed him, grabbed that stinky old hypocrite with his forearm around his
throat, and ripped into his neck with his teeth. The Old Soldier flailed and
struggled as he clamped his mouth over the Old Soldier’s wound and began to
gulp down the hot red fluid. His mind was flooded with images and flavors as he
dragged the Old Soldier’s body back into the shadows of a building. Alcohol
flavors filled his mouth everything from cheap whiskey, convenience store wine
and even some expensive champagne… the tastes of a lifetime, so small so
unvaried. The Old Soldier’s blood was thin and poured out of him quicker than
most… he was gone in a manner of minutes and he stood up from his feast and
examined the work he had done.

            He
felt like shit, complete and utter shit… flies and everything. The Old
Soldier’s body curled on the cold concrete like he was sleeping. A part of him
wanted the Old Soldier to wake up. A part of him wanted the Old Soldier to be
just like he was. He let the man lay there and picked up the old bowling bag
that had been dropped when he had attacked the Old Soldier. He peered inside to
see that there was just one stake, buried under a mound of severed fingers
covered in silver rings. He dug in the bag trying to pull the stake free
without spilling fingers all over the sidewalk. Then he did what he thought was
right.

            He
made his way through the city streets, with quick harried steps. It was as if
he could feel the sun rising over the earth… he felt like a giant running
around a quickly spinning earth, always trying to stay in the darkness while
the light from the sun loomed just behind him, a never-ending treadmill that
would lead to his death in one way or another.

People started
to appear, not a lot, but a few. City workers with spray hoses, blasting the
sidewalks with water to keep them clean, as if that were important. Dustcarts
and street sweepers clearing the streets of the night’s filth… would one of
those sweep the Old Soldier’s body up? Would a pointless, power-washing bastard
come along and blast the Old Soldier’s body into a gutter, just to have a
street sweeper come along and sweep his body into a bin… so that he could be
deposited at the dump to rot into nothing, while bottle caps and cigarette
butts outlasted his decaying bones on this earth. Let the city rot, let the
city crumble and fade into nothing. Bring the buildings down with the
sledgehammer of time and erosion. Let garbage lay on the street; let people see
what they make every day. Don’t hide it in some out of the way place and stack
it pile upon pile, pretending that that shit is going to go away. He imagined
the earth sometime in the future with a new layer. No more crust, mantle and
core,… in the future it would be crust, landfill, bottle caps and cigarette
butts, mantle and then core… who knows maybe the core will be gone by then, and
all that will be left is a skeleton of a society that covered itself in garbage
like a bum looking for insulation on a cold winter night… frozen in the waste
of a people that just didn’t care.

He made it to
his apartment, just as the sun came over the horizon. He climbed up his
shadowed staircase, and turned around to glance at the morning’s early rays
splashed on the sidewalk below his shaded hiding place. It burnt his eyes and
gave him a headache. He climbed into his coffin, closed the lid, and cried for
some indeterminable reason as he breathed the stale cigarette and whiskey
stained air that was trapped in the coffin with him.

            When
he woke up later that night, climbing from the stale air of his coffin, he was
surprised to find that the Old Soldier was not there, then it all came back to
him. Maybe the child had been a mistake… maybe. Who knew what a vampire was
willing to do? He wondered what he would do if he had the opportunity to turn
his daughter into a vampire, or his wife. Would he do it? Would he make them
have the life that he was now living?

            He
couldn’t do that to them. No one deserved to be forced to live like that, if
you could even call it living. He looked around the room, feeling the emptiness
of the place. Somehow it felt smaller without the Old Soldier curled up in a
comatose ball on the floor with smudges on the wall where he had snuffed out
his beauties. Now it looked like a discount construction material store. Chunks
of wood stood in the corner, ready to be turned into stakes, a hammer rested in
the corner, and a staple gun sat next to it. There was no art, no decoration,
nothing to really say that anyone even lived there; no one really did when you
thought about it.

            He
wandered into the bathroom and splashed some water on his face… looking at it
for the first time in weeks. Gaunt and pale, his eyes were ringed by purplish
bruises that made him look like something of a raccoon. Scratches covered his
face, healing quickly but they’d be there for a while. Red crusty scabs
protruded from the smoothness of his pail skin. A blind person might be able to
tell an interesting tale using those.

            He
put a wife beater over his skeletal frame and walked down the stairs to the
street. The night was cooler, the heat had moved out during the day and clouds
had moved in. It wasn’t cold out, your beer would probably still heat up in ten
or fifteen minutes if you didn’t down it quickly enough, but it was an
improvement over the previous weeks’ unbearable heatwave.

            He
walked to the corner where boxes filled with meaningless papers collected,
rotted, and waited to be saved from their horrible imprisonment inside blue and
yellow plastic boxes, one of which was shaped like a house. He plopped a couple
of quarters inside the blue metal box that said “The Oregonian” on the side of
it, pulled down the door, lifted out a paper, and let the door slam shut
without a care for how much noise it would make.

            He
stumbled back the way he had come, up the stairs, and into his apartment. He
took a seat on the floor and examined the newspaper. The front page was filled
with something about the President being a fuck up… news from the war.
Basically, a whole lot of nothing. In the right corner of the front page, he
found what he was looking for. A title reading Vampire slasher kills again: 6
dead and one possibly connected murder in SE. He turned to the page reading the
story. The story did a perfunctory job of relating the carnage he had caused,
glossing over the violence with the words “mutilated corpses.” The newspaper
writer made the child’s death seem more important than any of the other people,
which made him laugh. The story even talked about the Old Soldier, saying, “The
body of a homeless man was found a few blocks away, murdered in a similar fashion
to the recent string of killings. Police are still unsure about the man’s
connection to the murders and are working to figure out the man’s identity.” He
threw the paper down in disgust, more at the writer than at himself. The
reporter that wrote the story was just like all of the others, no curiosity, no
real skill, just a simple reporting of facts… no inquiry as to the reason. As
far as the world was concerned, he was just a psycho on a killing spree. Well,
let them think what they will; he had a purpose, a destiny that would continue
until he had completed his revenge.

            He
got up off of his ass and walked over to where he had laid the knife after
coming home. He picked it up and looked at its dulled edge, tiny flecks of gore
and drying skin were stuck where the blade made the handle. He walked to the
bathroom and scrubbed the knife, making sure that no offensive flesh clung to
it. Then he sat on the floor polishing the blade and sharpening it on a
whetstone, one of the things that the Old Soldier had taught him. When the
blade was sharper than a razor, he grabbed a piece of wood and began turning it
into a stake.

            He
turned the piece of wood over in his hands, feeling its rough cut… cheap pine
used for construction of cheap apartment complexes and townhouses built so
close together that you could hear your neighbor farting and fucking. Coffins
built so close together that a single match could destroy a hundred lives. He
cut a slice of wood away. Cheap pine fell to the floor in an unceremonious
pile, revealing the stake underneath, waiting to be exposed to the stale air of
his apartment, waiting to be plunged into the breast of a monster… the wood
thrummed in his hands, the blade whirring like a professional machine in a wood
shop, turning a cheap piece of pine into a weapon of great design. This one was
special; this one was made for the whore.

He had spent
most of the night before readying his arsenal. A pile of stakes stood off to
the side and his most special stake twirled in his hands, smooth and
lightweight; it felt special… it felt like the end. He knew that the stake
would be the end of him, once it had been used, he would be done… and then he’d
have to carve one more stake, but there was a lot to do before he could think
about that.

Hunger gnawed
at him for one thing… but he couldn’t go to the club and hunt… not tonight; it
was too soon. The heat was thick, literally and figuratively. The brief respite
of coolness had left, clouds faded away like dreams and lives to be replaced by
the stagnant leftover heat of the sun-baked city. The hunger was growing, he
had no choice; he had to feed… and he wasn’t going to go out digging for rats.
He was done with that shit. He was becoming a gourmet.

He walked to
the kitchen and rummaged through the cupboards, looking for something. He found
it, an old plastic measuring cup with faded numbers. A small layer of cupboard
dust had collected in the bottom of it, but that didn’t matter at the moment.
He loaded up his knife, a stake and his measuring cup and walked downstairs to
the apartment just below his.

He kindly
knocked on the door and listened. He could hear some scrambling on the other
side of the door and then he was there, opening the door, a face he had seen a
lifetime ago. The gaunt man hung in the doorway, a thin sheen of sweat on his
forehead, and rings under his eyes.

“What do you
want?” he asked in an exasperated tone.

“I just came
to see if I could borrow a cup of sugar.”

The neighbor
looked around before he answered, “Where’s your vet. buddy? I ain’t seen him
around in the last couple of days. I usually see him pissing on the stairs or
rolling cigarettes at the bottom of the landing.”

“I had to make
him leave… he’s been getting a little preachy lately.”

That decided
it for the man. He opened the door wide and asked him to come in, snatching the
cup from him and closing the door behind him.

“I’ll give you
a cup of sugar, but just because it’s actually been quiet around here the last
couple days. I don’t know what you two were doing up there, but it sounded like
two elephants fucking.”

The man
rambled on, obviously feeling that he could bust his balls since he was doing
him such a grand favor. The man opened a cupboard in the kitchen and as he
reached up to grab a rumpled sack of sugar, he brought the knife around the
man’s throat slicing it gingerly. He spun the man around like a partner in some
sort of bizarre dance routine and placed his lips on the man’s throat, slurping
greedily. The man kicked and fought, screaming a little bit, but mostly just
managing to make a mess out of all the things on the counter. A coffee pot fell
to the ground, the glass carafe smashing into a thousand pieces. A fruit bowl
was upended and bananas bounced with dull thuds as apples rolled across the
linoleum floor to come to rest on the carpet of the living room. They danced
two paces to the left, and the neighbor reached his hands out for anything and
came up with the handle to the refrigerator door. He pulled it open as they
fell to the ground, dead white light covering their bodies in its cold embrace
as refrigerator fog poured out into the heat of the apartment cooling them
down.