Unmade: A Neo-Nihilist Vampire Tale (25 page)

The flavors
rushed into his head… tinged with sorrow and depression. The flood was
bittersweet and melancholy, macaroni and cheese, mashed potatoes and gravy,
fastfood, and TV dinners. The things a lonely man dines on. When he released
the man, he still had some strength left in him. He laid bent with his back
against the refrigerator, his arms moved weakly, reaching for the bottoms of
his jeans, fighting for his life, however pitiful it was. His eyes turned to
him and he looked like a junky struggling to communicate from the depths of
euphoria, except right now he was on the other side of the spectrum.  The man’s
eyes were glazed and words began to tumble out of his mouth.

“I’m sorry… so
sorry… what a waste, I wasted my whole… for nothing.” His eyes went blank and
his head lolled to the side.

He pulled the
stake from where he had tucked it in the back of his jeans and rammed it home.
He dragged the body into the bathroom and threw it in the tub. He cursed
himself for being so stupid. This wasn’t the type of neighborhood where a body
could be dumped or even transported very easily. He was just going to have to
leave it.

He walked into
the main room of the apartment, just like his but filled with trinkets, goods,
racks of DVD’s, a TV, a futon… posters on the walls. He wandered around
admiring the stuff the guy had bought, meaningless things to keep his mind from
his sad little life. A briefcase sat at the edge of his futon, where he assumed
the guy had spent the majority of his free time. He plopped onto the futon in a
spot that was well-worn, well-used, and picked up the briefcase, snapping it
open to reveal the contents inside. There was a collection of papers with
numbers printed on them, pointless numbers that meant nothing. He tossed the
briefcase on the floor and examined the DVD’s on the racks… half of them were
pornography and the rest might as well have been… masturbatory horror flicks
with busty chicks featured prominently on the covers, women in peril, action
movies where muscular dudes mowed through uncountable numbers of faceless,
uniformed soldiers for no real reason.

The TV was
exceptionally nice, it must have been a 44 incher with an LCD screen. He picked
up the remote to see what the picture looked like. As the TV popped on, the
picture showed up clear as day. It was the local news. The newscasters were
busy bantering while the weatherman informed them that yes, more “great”
weather was coming their way.

“Wow thanks
Steve, that’s some great news.” Like Steve has anything to fucking do with the
weather. Everyone knows that Steve is just a face man. He probably doesn’t even
read the meteorological instruments… there was probably a group of ugly
scientists in some room a hundred miles away, a room full of the stuff. They
would sit in their room reading numbers, looking at temperatures, barometric
pressure, and Doppler radar putting all this shit together… and all Steve had
to do was read a fucking teleprompter and click buttons on his damn remote.

They were
going to a commercial break, but before they did the airheaded blonde on the TV
said, “Coming up on the other side of the break, see how firefighters helped
save this kitten from being stuck in a tree, plus, if you’re looking for a way
to stay cool, we’ll show you how some kids in SE are putting their ingenuity
into action… then later, we’ve got some breaking news on the Vampire killer
that has been terrorizing Portland.” He leaned forward and laughed… kittens in
a tree. He was beaten by kittens in a tree. He supposed that was a good thing.

The
commercials came on. There was one that touted Channel 2 news as the number one
local news station in Oregon. There was a commercial for some cleaning agent
with a mom smiling happily, glad that she had gotten that stain out of her kids
soccer uniform. There was a commercial for a trendy couple enjoying a ride
through the country as their kids sat oblivious in the backseat, ear phones on
their head, zombified by a DVD screen in the backseat.

Then the news
came on and he sat through the harrowing tale of a kitty in peril, the
heartwarming show of entrepreneurial ingenuity as a group of kids sold lemonade
to help a schoolmate that had been wounded in a drive-by shooting, and multiple
scenes of kids playing in a fountain by the river. Then his story came on. They
showed clips of police task force agents hypothesizing on who he was. According
to the mustachioed cop on the screen he was quite disturbed, clearly suffering
from some sort of delusion. The brutality of the crime scenes was quite
startling… and if anyone had any information, the police should be notified
immediately. The coolest thing was, that there was a reward out for any
information that led to his arrest… $25,000, not bad.

It sounded
like the police had their thumbs up their asses… as usual. He flipped the
channels, and finding nothing of interest, he began to look through the rest of
the apartment. He found his neighbor’s wallet and took what little cash was in
it. Dinner and some cash, what a gracious fellow. He took the man’s keys and
left the apartment, turning off the TV before he left. He made sure the door
was locked and as he was closing the door, he said, “Thanks for the sugar.”

He wasted a
few more days just kicking around in his apartment… loneliness absorbed him, a
smothering blanket that clouded his mind and his thoughts. Visions of purple-black
hair danced in his head, and he longed for the company of the Old Soldier. The
newspapers on the window were stained yellow with nicotine and the carpet
showed signs of his stay, the rock hard cigarette burns of synthetic material
lined the carpet in the corner of the apartment.

The day passed
long, as he tossed and turned in his coffin… visions of death and brutality
flooded him even more than the loneliness. His mind turned like a screw,
delving deeper and deeper into the depths… where it overflowed with fears and
desires that he had never known.

In order to
beat the monotony of waiting for the heat of the cops to die down, he would
journey downstairs and visit his neighbor. His flesh had drained of color and
the blood that he had left in the bathtub had turned a nasty yellowish color,
the remains of plasma, dry like fossils. The neighbor swelled with the gas of
the bacteria that were even now consuming his flesh. The stink was abysmal; the
hot weather hadn’t helped any.

He had gone to
the store and purchased a couple of rolls of saran wrap and a lighter… to help
with the smell as faint whiffs of it could already be detected on the landing
to his apartment. He wrapped the neighbor in the saran wrap burning the ends
together and snuffing out the flames with his fingertips quickly to make a hard
seal. By the end of the venture, the neighbor looked like a new age mummy,
resting in the bathtub with crinkles of saran wrap around his face. Only one
eye was visible… open and decaying.

The smell
still lingered in the apartment, but after a couple of days, it dissipated on
the landing. He watched a few of the man’s porno films, but found nothing
exciting in them. A penis here, some tits there… some head. Still he managed to
rub a couple out, wiping his seed on the stash of “important” papers in the man’s
briefcase.

While he was
hanging out one day watching some cartoon about kids that captured animals and
forced them to fight… a phone call interrupted his disgust. The phone rang four
times before it clicked over to the answering machine, the mechanical voice of
his neighbor came on, asking people to leave a message after the beep. How
original.

A voice spoke
up after the beep, “Hi, it’s Marcia at work, we were just wondering how you
were doing… we haven’t seen you in a couple of days. If you don’t come in
tomorrow or we don’t receive a call from you, don’t bother coming back. Anyway,
give us a call and let us know what is going on.” She rattled off the number
like a robot… seven digits that connect you like a god to a magical answering
machine… miles away.

He let the
woman finish her spiel and picked up the phone, dialing the numbers
methodically… it rang four times and then the machine picked up… “Hi, Marcia, I
was just returning your call to let you know that you’re a worthless cunt. If I
ever see you or anyone else from that company, I’m going to come down there and
stab you all in the face… except for you Marcia… I’ve got something special in
mind for you.” He laughed as he hung up the phone, a brief giggle of amusement
as he imagined the look on Marcia’s face when she listened to the message as
her mind inevitably wandered to what “something special” might be.

He drowned his
loneliness with TV, brief questioning conversations with his mummified neighbor,
and money shot reels that he found on the bonus features of porno DVD’s… white
jets of semen spreading over women’s tongues, mouths, and eyes. But none of
them had purple-black hair… and he was back to that again.

The time came,
and he was more than ready… he was excited.

            He
woke up that night and filled the old bowling bag with stakes and finished
sharpening his knife on the whetstone as it had become dulled by repeatedly
shaving off chunks of cheap pine. The bag bulged with its cargo, a deadly
arsenal. He turned off the lights to his apartment and locked the door behind
him… not that there was anything to steal really, just some old boxes filled
with relics of a past life. Some clothes, some pictures, pieces of memorabilia
of who he used to be. Now he was a different person, colder, harder,  and with
a sense of purpose. He was a machine… his body thrummed like the hum of
machinery in the warehouse district. He was electric, a creature made to burn,
to crush, to stab… to dispense justice. His battery was running low and he had
one last task to accomplish… one last piece of trash to compact in his rough
hands threaded with tendons and hate.

            He
set out through the city, along the same path to the Glasshouse… up the hill,
down through downtown, across the bridge, and into the warehouse district on
the east bank of the river. A journey, slow and arduous filled with the
remembrances of what had come before. Faded visages danced through his mind,
streaked with blood and eyes filled with gratitude. He was right, he was just.
A figure of justice, a man that could see and made no mistake. He saw the
copper-haired woman’s face clearly… thanking him for ending her tortured
existence. He saw the bouncer from Beelzebub’s his eyes open wide as he gushed
blood, shock registering the fact that his life was going to end. He saw the
faces of the group from the other night… the face of the child, spared the pain
of having to live. They all thanked him and sang his praises as he walked
through the cracked streets of a city that had waited so long for a man like
him, someone willing to clean the streets, someone willing to come out at night
and pick up the human trash that the workers forgot to sweep up. The killers,
the bad guys, they were all his domain… washed up bags of flesh that had to be
drained and punctured before they were ready for the pile.

            The
city was full of scared faces tonight… faces hidden by collars pulled up. The
heat had died down and a faint sheen of mist fell from the sky, muggy but cool,
the night air enveloped him like a silent accomplice… the man on his shoulder
where the Old Soldier used to walk, smoke replaced by mist, heat replaced by
coolness. This was new; this was the way.

            People
moved aside, as the scarred man strode down the sidewalk with purpose, a grin on
his face and resolve in his shoulders. He watched as night people moved about
walking to places that had no names, on tasks that would be forgotten by the
morning, and he felt alive. He was life, a piece of death so concentrated that
life sprang up everywhere he went. The fear he saw on the people’s faces was
the proof of that. Never was one more alive than when you feared for your life.
He was a gift. He was death.

            The
city melted away underneath his feet, carrying him almost unbeknownst to the Burnside Bridge, through the decaying tombs of the living, through the streets lined with
bums and drug dealers, across the river into the place where they hid amongst
the living, where they fed on the innocent in perfect impunity. No more… he was
the executioner, freed from any ties of law or corruption. His justice was
pure, quick and necessary, a shot of penicillin into the infected heart of the
city.

            He
wandered the rails of the warehouse district where cars jounced as they crossed
from the bland streets of other neighborhoods into the thrumming part of the
never-sleeping city. The mist fell from the sky like static on the television,
soaking him in a gradual way that was quite comforting. Sweat streamed down his
face in a combination of salt and rainwater. The Old Soldier would have
complained about his beauties getting wet, but that was no big deal anymore.

            He
came to a stop across the street from the Glasshouse, he stood like one of
those British guards in front of a gate, no sound, no movement… just pure
observation, a prosecutor building a case. The people wandered into the club at
a slower pace than usual. He was also aware of a group of police officers
watching the front of the place… the nose of their car sticking out from the
corner of the adjacent street. He could see two guys in the car, joking, with
coffee on their dashboard. They hadn’t noticed him yet so he decided he would
have to go inside… as he had no visible excuse to be standing there… and sooner
or later they would come fuck with him if he stood there any longer.

            He
walked across the street, strolling past the bouncer who gave him no more trouble
than a starved kitten.  He entered The Glasshouse through a puff of cigarette
smoke and a blast of industrial music.