Unmade: A Neo-Nihilist Vampire Tale (4 page)

            The
paper was littered with ads for everything; that was the curse of being
“independent.” You had to sell your ass to every lowlife and scumbag company in
the city. In the back of the paper, there were ads for “escorts,” High-priced
hookers who would never say they were going to fuck you and charged an arm and
a leg whether they did or not. One of his co-workers at the gas station in
Scappoose, a guy named Clint, had ordered an escort once. He said she had come
to the door in 30 minutes, just like a pizza; hot pussy pie.

He smiled
thinking about the way Clint had said “hot pussy pie.” He had rocked up on his
toes and arched his back, looking as if he was trying to push his dick as far
away from himself as possible. Clint had said that the chick was average-looking
at best and, in the end, all he got was what amounted to a hundred-dollar hand job.

He looked at
the pictures for a while and decided that’s exactly what he needed; a piece of
“hot pussy pie.” He wasn’t going to pay for it though. He could give himself a
hundred-dollar hand job for free. It’s not like he had the money to throw
around anyways. He had enough money for a couple of months rent and living, but
living didn’t include paying some skank a hundred bucks to massage his junk.

He flipped
through the paper looking at all the ads and remembering what it was like to
chase after something that wasn’t within your power to just take. “Hot pussy
pie” had to be given if it was going to be any good. He was mulling over all
the techniques, all the little tricks and ploys he knew about for attaining a
piece of pie when an ad jumped out at him. “Fetish Night at Beelzebub’s,” it
said. It had a picture of a little devil poking a woman in the ass with a
pitchfork. It was as good a place to start as any. He doubted that any of the
women there would mind if he totally butchered his approach. That could be his
fetish; trying to pick up women with bad pick up lines and gimmicks. He wasn’t
confident of his skills. It had been a long time since he had tried to hook up
with anyone, but at the very least, he might have some fun.

            The
time had come. He had showered and cleaned himself up as well as he could.
There wasn’t much he could do for the bruising on his face, but he still
decided he looked better than most people. He didn’t know what to expect or
even why he was doing what he was doing. He didn’t really care. It would be
good to do something and forget about the problems, the things that hung over
his head.

            He
stepped out of his lovely abode and sauntered down the street ready to face the
rest of the night and the unknown. Just from looking at all of the events
listed on the club’s ad, the place he was heading to was a real freakshow type
of place. Beelzebub’s it was called and it seemed to cater to the darker side
of the public, hence the name. It was on the west side of town, two blocks over
from the Burnside Bridge. It was definitely in the right part of town if you
wanted to see freaky people.

            He
had walked down Burnside on his way home from the rental office. In between the
coffee shop and the McDonald’s he had somehow walked past the place without
marking it. He probably hadn’t noticed it because of all the bums and lowlifes
that had populated the street. It wasn’t the worst part of town, but it was
close.  It was the type of place that would make a person notice the lump that
they called a wallet in their back pocket. Only he didn’t carry a wallet and
had nothing to lose.

            The
summer heat had abated for the evening and the coolness on his skin was a great
relief to the stifling air of his apartment. He walked down the street,
enjoying the crisp night air and the splash of streetlight fluorescence. It was
10 o’clock on a Monday night and there was no sun, no traffic, and no bums in
sight. This was how he had imagined it, his move to the city. He set off down
the street enjoying the silence of his gait as it moved him down the evenly divided
squares of concrete that made up the sidewalk. The trees hung over the sidewalk
and abutted the buildings, making a kind of tunnel of darkness. He could see
the streetlights splashing the pavement at the next intersection. He was
reminded of all those life-after-death stories.

            ‘Go
into the light,’ he thought to himself and laughed. He must look mad, a beat up
face in jeans and a T-shirt laughing his way down the block. He stopped to
admire the splotches of unintelligible graffiti emblazoned on the wall. It was
green and he couldn’t quite make out the meaning of it. He liked the way it
looked, especially the runs of paint that had dried in mid-drip, but he
couldn’t figure out why anyone would take time to spray paint something that no
one else could figure out. Maybe there was a secret society of taggers or gang
members that could read taganese. He certainly wasn’t one of them.

            He
moved on, down and across the street, noticing the various splashes of black,
green, and red that had been left on the city. Maybe they weren’t made by
people at all. Maybe they were made by aliens as signposts. It made sense. An
alien might travel thousands of light-years or whatever distance they used
these days, find himself in a city, and wind up hopelessly, completely lost.
That’s probably why he couldn’t read the damn things. Aliens had made them. It
all made perfect sense.

            His
thoughts cascaded through the waterfall of his mind as the blocks passed away
under his feet and the alien tags passed by his eyes. Soon, he found himself on
Burnside. Even if someone had dropped him here on the street wearing a blindfold,
he would probably still have been able to tell that it was Burnside. The shops
here were decidedly skuzzy and all closed by 6:00, except for the ones that catered to the myriad of street people that populated the streets. These people
weren’t punks or gangsters, they were 100% genuine street people. They weren’t
there because they loved the streets, you could tell that by looking at them.
They were there because they had no place else to go or they didn’t have the
mind to make sense of what they were supposed to do. Some of them pushed around
shopping carts full of possessions and others simply sat and stared at the
ground, looking up occasionally, as if the world had suddenly changed on them. The
ones pushing carts didn’t actually push them as much as they stood there
looking confused, waiting for someone to take them home, maybe a lost lover or
a family member that has been looking for them since they went missing. They
were more than homeless, these people; they were people-less. He wasn’t afraid
of them. He didn’t even feel sorry for them. He felt like an alien walking
through an open air zoo full of humans that had been reduced to exhaustion and
loneliness. For a second, he wished that he could teach these people to read
the graffiti and maybe find a better place, a home. Regrettably, he didn’t know
how to read the signs and he realized he wasn’t too far from being one of these
creatures himself.

            He
put some purpose in his step and covered the last two blocks to Beelzebub’s in
no time at all. It was all well and good to walk along pondering the
mundanities of the world, but sooner or later you had to get living. He stood
in front of Beelzebub’s in his power-stance eyeing the maw of the place.
Painted flames ran up the side of the building and a burly bouncer stood with
his arms folded, eyeing him from the corner of his eye. He was big, but he
didn’t look like he could bounce much more than an empty beer mug off a dive
bar’s table. He stood there wondering whether he wanted to go in, when a couple
of leather-clad women strolled by and into Beelzebub’s without a look at the
bouncer. His groin filled with desire and for a second he thought it had moved
simply at the sight of the pasty skinned duo strolling arm-in-arm.

            ‘I
guess the party’s already started,’ he thought as he steeled himself for a
night full of fetish and probable embarrassment.

            As
he attempted to walk in, the bouncer put his hand in the middle of his chest,
stopping him in his tracks. He looked into the man’s green-flecked brown eyes,
waiting for an explanation. The bouncer looked at his face with green-flecked
calculation before he spoke.

            “Looks
like you’ve been in some scrapes, fella. We don’t want no trouble in here. Are
you going to be trouble?”

            He
looked the bouncer straight in the eye, hesitating and sending dark thoughts
through the man’s hand on his chest, up his arm and into his brain. When the
thoughts hit the man’s brain, he could feel an almost imperceptible recoil in
the man’s hand.

            “I’m
not going to be any trouble, guy.” He went to move past the bouncer but he
quickly stepped in front and gave him another shove to the chest; this one was
much softer and had a tinge of respect behind it.

            “I’m
glad to hear it,” the bouncer stammered, “but, I want to make sure we’re clear.
Just cuz’ those ladies dress like sluts, doesn’t mean you can go in there and
treat them like sluts. I’ve seen your type before. They show up at the door
expecting loose women and even looser rules. That ain’t the way it is, pal.
Don’t do anything in there that is gonna make me have to talk to you again,
cuz’ you ain’t gonna like the way I talk.”

            The
bouncer released his hold on him and he took a half a step forward before he
wheeled around. His blood seethed and boiled inside his veins. He could feel it
pulsing through the walls of his mouth. He felt like his body was filled with
sharp clawed bugs that were trying to escape from his skin.

            “You
don’t have anything to worry about. That ain’t my style, so if I have to ‘talk’
to you again, it’s because you have a problem with me. And if I have to ‘talk’
to you, you’re going to earn the title of bouncer… because that’s exactly what
will happen when your lifeless body hits the sidewalk.”

            The
bouncer was apparently stunned at his candor because he had no problem walking
into Beelzebub’s. Soon he was inside the door and away from the bouncer’s
green-flecked calculations.

            He
didn’t see as the bouncer called over one of his compatriots and pointed out
the man in the T-shirt, blue jeans, and the bruised face.

            He
shoved his way through the crowd, the majority of which seemed to be hanging out
by the entrance, creating the illusion that the place was more packed than it
actually was. The inside of Beelzebub’s was not what he had expected. He was
expecting a more dungeon-like atmosphere with lots of open space and
rubber-girls performing scandalous skills while reclining in medieval torture
devices. That’s not what it was at all.

            The
inside of the club was dingy and dark. There were only two sources of
illumination; a string of red Christmas lights that ran all the way around the
club and overhead blacklights that lit up the middle of the room. A bar ran
along one side of the club and the rest of the place was open space, except for
a stage at the end of the bar. Hot cigarette smoke and exhaled breath hovered
in the air making it unbearably hot.

As he stood,
surveying the landscape, people milled around. The majority of the people stood
against the bar or near the entrance. The people were also unexpected. There
were quite a few people dressed like he had imagined, leather outfits, whips,
chains, and all the fixin’s; however, there were also quite a few people who
seemed to be out of place, people like himself. The majority of the latter
seemed to be composed of college students and quite a few Stanks. The Stanks'
thick, black plastic eyeglasses glinted underneath the blacklights of Beelzebub’s.
He wondered how many of them were here just to get a piece of “hot pussy pie.”

As he
contemplated this, the two women who had entered just before he did walked by.
The first girl was leading the other girl by a leash attached to a studded leather
collar that hung loosely around the second girl’s neck. He eyed the second
girl’s apple bottom as she walked by.

The “leader”
was wearing a black vinyl dress that clung to her like a second skin and came
down to the muscular part of her thigh. The dress zipped up in the front, or at
least, it would have had she not had the zipper lowered to an almost scandalous
level. He didn’t mind admiring the area between the hills of her breasts. The
skin there glittered and would have glowed even if the blacklights hadn’t been
there. She had copper red hair culled into an all-business ponytail, which
bounced a little with each high-heeled step.

The first girl
was stunning to look at but it was the second girl that he couldn’t take his
eyes off of. She had black hair that looked almost purplish. Her face was made
up to look pale, but on her abundance of exposed flesh he saw that she had a
bit of natural color. She was wearing a more conservative outfit than the
copper-haired girl, but that still wasn’t saying much. She wore a pair of vinyl
pants that came up to her lower back and left a tiny portion of butt exposed.
Even were that not exposed, he could still basically see what was going on
underneath her clothes. Skin-tight vinyl pants had a way of doing that for a
girl’s figure. She wore a purple and black leather corset that smashed her
boobs together and showed off her figure to perfection. Her high cheekbones and
cut jawline gave her serious no nonsense look.

The
copper-haired girl led the second girl through the crowd as if she was showing
off her prize possession. She walked like a woman who was used to getting what she
wanted, her hips sauntering back and forth with each step. The girl on the
leash followed almost adoringly, the shiny rubber of her pants reflected the
blacklights off the curve of her ass. They marched up on stage and the music
began.