Unmade: A Neo-Nihilist Vampire Tale (28 page)

He was carried
through the clerical department of the police station and into a nice little
room, where a fat bald man was sitting behind a desk. The cops plopped him on
the floor, and turned to leave.

“What the fuck
are you doing? Put him in the chair. He’s not going to tell me squat if he’s
sitting on the floor like a piece of luggage.”

Vincent Price
mumbled an apology to the bald man and the Samoan dude started unhooking the
handcuffs. He gave them a little trouble but nothing that required more kicks
and cuffs from the police officers. His body was on the edge right now, and he
didn’t know how much more he could stand. They placed him in a rickety wooden
chair that was as uncomfortable as it was unsteady. One of his legs was affixed
to the chair via the wonder of the handy dandy handcuffs, while his left wrist
was chained to the table in the same manner. He noticed that the table was
firmly bolted to the ground. Clearly there would be no great escape. Cops
weren’t nearly as incompetent as they were in the movies… maybe he could get
one of them to take him to the outhouse, and then he could make his break. He
laughed again, maniacal to everyone but himself. The Samoan dude and Vincent
Price finished checking out his connections.

“You need
anything else, Chief?” Vincent Price asked.

“No, you guys
have done enough already. This guy looks like a tumor. Keep your shit in check.
The last thing we need is this guy walking because you guys can’t rein in your
tempers.”

The Samoan
dude said “Sorry, Chief,” in his clipped Samoan accent and they both left
closing the door behind them. The fat bald man sat down behind the table,
composing his opening remarks, most likely. The light in the ceiling was
fluorescent. He was slightly disappointed that it wasn’t a low-wattage bulb
hanging on a wire that could be used to blind him at any given moment. There
was no two-way mirror, no cameras… no nothing. It was just a room, a plain old
room with a table and two chairs, a pile of bruises and a fat bald man.

“I’m Police
Chief Vandell. I wish I could say it’s a pleasure to meet you, but it’s not.”
The Chief pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, good old mass-manufactured
cigarettes. He pulled one out and lit it, inhaling the smoke in an almost
wistful manner. “You know, this is the only room I can get away with smoking
in. The world these days, has it in for smokers… can’t smoke anywhere without
some upright citizen or one of your men giving you a dirty look. You’d think I
was smoking crack or something.”

The Chief’s
pointless monologue stopped as he took another drag off of his cigarette. He
was glad, he felt like he was being lectured by his parents after he had gotten
caught smoking. He expected Vandell to jump up at any moment and cram lit
cigarettes in his mouth until the whole pack was gone.

“What about
you, boy? Do you care if I smoke?”

He didn’t say
anything. There was no point.

“Not much of a
talker, are you? Well, I’ll tell you one thing. You better start talking pretty
quick or things aren’t going to be that nice for you. Not like they have been.
We got a world of pain here… secret pain, pain that can’t be seen in a
courtroom. Unless you want some of that, you better unknot that tongue right
now.”

He sat there
looking at the fat bald man. He produced a handkerchief out of one of his blue
uniform’s pockets and blew his nose into it. He paused and then spread it open
to look at it, then folded it neatly and put it back in his pocket, wiping his
hands on his pants.

“Listen, I
ain’t no justice freak. What you did might shock people, but I don’t give a
shit. I’ve seen way worse than what you did… just not on such a large scale.
How many people did you kill anyway?”

Vandell leaned
back in his chair ashed on the floor.

“You’re going
to start a fire,” he said to the Chief.

“Oh, the
silent man breaks… well, that’s a start. Maybe you’d like to tell me what your
name is. Who is this mysterious man that sits before me?”

“It’s not important.
Dead men have no names.”

“You’re dead?
Funny, I don’t remember ever seeing a dead man talk.” Vandell laughed and
tapped out his cigarette on the edge of the table. “Let’s just say you weren’t
dead. What might your name be then?”

“I could give
you my name… but then I’d be giving you me, I’d be giving you my past… and a
man’s past is his existence. If you have my existence, I’d cease to exist.”

Vandell burst
out laughing, a hoarse, belly laugh tinged with a chainsmoker’s wheeze. “Oh,
that’s good, Dead Man. You’re a fucking philosopher. Well tell me this
Socrates, how is it that you know my name, and yet here I sit, existing.”

“You simply
think you’re existing. That’s the problem with this fucking place, this city…
all these dead people walking around convinced that they’re still alive… you’re
dead. You’ve been dead for a long time… now lay down and rot.”

“Wait, I
thought you were the Dead Man here. So if you’re dead, why don’t you just give
me a name, so we can give you a nice burial.”

“I’m dead in a
literal way, therefore I have no need for a name… and I don’t give you the name
that I used to go by when I was alive, because that person… that existence was
pure, unspoiled, and I won’t have you destroy that person.”

The Chief
mulled this over in his mind for a few seconds. “You mean you don’t want to
soil who you were with what you have become. I can understand that. I get it.”
He didn’t say anything in response and they sat in silence for a few minutes.

“You seem
shocked that I can even understand you. You think you got the corner on weird
thinking? I’ve talked to Jesus Christ sitting in that same chair… after he
killed his whole family so that they could go to Heaven. I’ve talked to a
rapist that insisted he was just a ghost and that the women he raped shouldn’t
have been able to feel anything… I’ve had conversations with Liza Minelli,
Barbara Streisand, and some guy that thought he was Michael Jackson… so what
are you? Clearly you’ve got some fucked up ideas about the world… so where do
they come from?”

He smiled,
knowing how crazy it was going to sound, “I’m a vampire.”

This set the
Chief rolling. He grabbed his sides as he burst into laughter. The Chief got up
out his chair and left the room wheezing with laughter and coughing in big
phlegmy fits. He called the Samoan dude and Vincent Price back into the room
and he stood there trying to catch his breath.

“Tell ‘em what
you told me, Dead Man.” The Chief doubled over, trying to catch his breath with
his hands on his knees as his two officers waited to hear what he was going to
say.

“I’m a
vampire.”

The room
erupted into more laughter and he couldn’t help but smile as the cops held onto
each other, incapacitated by laughter, their eyes teared up and their faces
turned red with the strain of it. They would just about get under control when
the Chief would mutter “a vampire” through wheezed breath and then they’d be
off again. This went off and on for four or five minutes, and then the Samoan
dude and Vincent Price wandered off into the hall, wiping tears from their eyes
and still giggling, he could hear them from the other side of the brown door
with the brass doorknob as they closed it behind them.

The Chief
wandered over to his seat, his bulk shifting with each stride. He pulled the
wooden chair out and plopped down. The chair creaked under his weight but it
appeared to be a lot less rickety than the chair that he sat in. The Chief
fumbled around in his pocket for his pack of cigarettes… finding them he pulled
out two. He lit the first one and then handed it to him across the table. He
grabbed it and placed the cigarette in his mouth, inhaling the bitter,
lung-burning smoke in a deep drag. He liked the smell; it reminded him of a
friend. The Chief then lit his own cigarette with a tiny red lighter, like a miniature
version of a real lighter… a lighter for children maybe.

The
fluorescent light in the room made their smoke look ugly. It billowed and hung
like smog, clinging to their skin and their clothes. He wondered if he would
get a change of clothes. He certainly didn’t want to smell like a middle-school
boiler room, where all the teachers go to smoke.

The Chief
leaned back puffing languorously on his burning bundle of tobacco rolled in
chemically-treated paper; sweat beaded on his forehead, turned cold and ran
down his face. The Chief smiled at him… put off guard and appreciative of the
man that sat across from him.

The Chief
flicked ash on the floor as he spoke again, “You know, for a crazy bastard.
You’re pretty funny. So let me ask you, are you serious about that vampire
shit?”

He took a puff
from his own cigarette, enjoying the burn and the few seconds it offered to
allow him to collect his thoughts. Smokers were the best people to hold
conversations with; their thoughts were always collected and arranged in
mid-puff, none of that mindless call and response action. The smoker would
listen to you when you talked, because they always had time to compose their
own thoughts instead of barely listening to you while trying to think up a
response on the fly.

“I’m dead
serious,” he smiled as soon as he said it, and The Chief couldn’t help but
laugh at the pun. He leaned back in his wooden chair and when his laughter died
down they stared at each other for an uncomfortable set of seconds. The Chief
seemed to realize that, despite the pun, he was indeed serious.

“Hold on a
second. I’ll be right back.” The Chief left the room closing the door behind
him, he heard the door’s lock click as he left. Clearly they were taking no
chances with him. He pulled on his handcuffs gritting his teeth at the pain of
hard steel digging into his wrist bones. It was no use, he might as well be
chained to a skyscraper… the table wasn’t going to budge. He would have to
grind his wrist down and crush the bones to get his hand out of those cuffs,
and that would probably be quicker than trying to break the table. It didn’t
matter anyway; the Chief was only gone for a few seconds. When he came in he
was puffing with exerted effort and a sort of giddy excitement.

“Alright,
buddy. Look into this and tell me what you see.” The Chief handed him a mirror.

He grabbed the
mirror with his free hand after dropping his cigarette on the floor and
snuffing it out with the toe of his shoe. Before he looked in the mirror he
looked at the Chief as if to say, “None of this matters.” He looked into a
woman’s tiny compact, probably one of the clerks he had seen in the room
outside of this one. There was his face, pale and scarred, scabs and bruises
still clung to his face. He looked like he had a skin disease, due to all the
scabs and bruises. His lip was split in a nice red line that ran a centimeter
up, where a boot toe had made contact with his mouth, squeezing the flesh
against his teeth until it had split. His eyes looked like deep brown pits, set
into the angular features of his skull. He looked like a skeleton covered in
blood.

“What do you
see, boy?”

“I see me… I
see what I’ve become.”

“Vampires
don’t have reflections.” The Chief sat back and waited for him to respond.

“Do you
believe everything you see in the movies?”

“Well, shit
man. Just look at your face. Shouldn’t your flesh be knitting up right now? Shouldn’t
those bruises be disappearing before my very eyes?”

“It’s not like
that, Chief. That isn’t the way it works.”

“Well you tell
me how it works then, because all I see in front of me is a sick man that’s
caused a lot of hurt and killed a lot of people.”

“I am a
vampire… you can beat the shit out of me, and you can break the fuck out of me,
but I’m still gonna keep coming. I may have to lay in a ditch for a while, but
sooner or later, my shit will be healed and I’ll be just like I was before,
scarred and tired, but just the same.”

“So tell me
vampire, did you or did you not suck the blood of these people?”

“I didn’t suck
the blood of everyone. I don’t need to feed that much, and it takes a lot
longer to drain someone of their blood than you would think. More time than you
have when you’ve got to take out a couple people.”

“Even a kid?”

He leaned back
in his seat, uncomfortable with where the conversation had gone. It was like
someone you didn’t even know pointing out and bringing up your biggest shame,
the one that no one knew about… the secret shame that you yourself barely ever
thought of because you had buried it at the back of your mind, because it hurt
and it was wrong and deep down you were embarrassed about it, even if you tried
not to admit it to yourself.

“What’s the
matter, Dead Man? Did we hit a sore spot? What’s a kid to a vampire like
yourself? You got a little remorse in there, I can see that. You’re not
completely crazy are you?

The Chief
flipped open a file that had been lying on the table untouched. There were
papers and reports as well as some pictures. He found the picture that he was
looking for and flipped it across to him.

He picked the
picture up and looked at it. It showed the kid, pinned to a dead woman by a
stake that he had stabbed the kid with, blood lay in black pools that were only
recognizable as blood around the edges where it was thin enough to show as red.
He felt nothing.

“It had to be
done. One kid is nothing with the amount of pain and death that these people
cause. That kid may not have been a vampire, but he would have become one… he
would have grown up to kill, just like the others.”

The Chief
looked at him in a sad way. “That was just a boy. Those people weren’t
vampires. They were people like you or me. There’s no proof for what you’re
saying. Other than the blood you spilled there, there isn’t a single piece of
evidence to support what you say.”