Unmade: A Neo-Nihilist Vampire Tale (10 page)

“Anyways, like
I said, this village was different. We come walkin’ in, in the middle of the
day, and there ain’t shit goin’ on. There ain’t even smoke from old fires.
Everything looks tip top, except there ain’t no fuckin’ people. So we spread
out; do a search of the village.”

“We weren’t
freaked out, not just yet anyway. We seen dead villages before, villages where
everyone had been wiped out, but this one wasn’t like those. There was no
damage. There weren’t any bullet holes in anything. There wasn’t no smell of rot
so you knew that whatever had gone down had gone down recently soon. There
weren’t any signs of scuffle except for some overturned baskets and shit.”

“We start
searching and pokin’ around and still nothing. No bodies, no corpses, no
freshly dug graves. Everything was left like they just disappeared and were plannin’
on comin’ back later. Me and the crew started to get antsy. They start gettin’
tense. Everyone’s got this feelin’ like somethin’ ain’t right. We’re all ready
to move on when one of the boys finds a path and some tracks.”

“These aren’t
your normal footprints. For sure there’s some footprints but most of the tracks
are drag marks. Someone that ain’t been in the shit might mistake the path for
a bike trail, lots of ruts and shit. But I seen enough to know that something
was dragged and the only thing that makes drag marks like that are human
bodies.”

“People start
pissing and groaning. By now pretty much everyone’s spooked and we don’t even
want to go up that trail. But Sarge, man, he’s all like, ‘Hey, people. We’re
not here for a fuckin’ vacation. We here to protect these people and kill
anything that wants to kill them.’ Sarge was a real asshole. Had red hair too.
I hate red hair."

“None of us
are buyin’ his shit, but, like I said, we’d been lucky and he ain’t never
steered us in no bad direction. So we strap our shit down, make sure we’re
locked and loaded and we make our way up the trail, quiet like fuckin’ death
himself, and that’s good too, cuz the jungle was even quieter. Let me tell you
boy, there ain’t no sign in the world that tells you you’re in the wrong
fuckin’ place like a jungle that’s dead quiet.”

“So there we
are creep, creep, creepin’ and I’m ready to just fuckin’ turn around and go
wait in the village when we come upon a clearing. That’s where we found all of
the villagers. They’re all strung up from the trees over this hole that’s been
dug in the ground. For a second I relax. You wouldn’t think that the sight of a
forty or fifty dead villagers would make a man relax, but I did. Then I see
some movement, in the hole, just the tops of a couple of heads and some
splashing.”

“By now we had
pretty much surrounded the clearing. We all close on the hole, silently,
creeping. The people in the hole don’t notice us and I’m the first one there,
and there they are, the only two living people we seen besides ourselves and
they’re fucking. A guy and a girl sitting in a pool of villagers' blood, just
fucking their brains out. I almost threw up right there. Some motherfuckers did,
but not me. I know better than to take my eyes off the type of people that
would fuck in a pool of people’s blood.”

“The two
fuckers look right up at me and smile. That’s it man. The two sick fucks just
look up, in mid-fuck and smile. By now, we got the whole place surrounded.
Sarge makes the Mormon boy jump in the hole and pull the fuckers apart. I’m
sittin’ there watchin’ the boy struggle with these two savages in the hole and
I swear I seen them maniacs both start gulping up mouthfuls of blood. The
Mormon boy wasn’t the strongest boy, and he was having some trouble, so Sarge
tells me to get in and help him out."

"So I
climb in and we still can’t drag the fuckers out of that pit. It takes two more
of us to pull the bastards out of the hole and the whole time the guy and the
girl are trying to scoop handfuls of blood into their mouths. We all figure
they’re crazy so Sarge has us bring ‘em back into the village because everyone
has had enough of that clearing. So we march the two bastards, naked and
covered in blood, back into the village, right into the middle of it. We throw
them down in the dirt and Sarge tells the interpreter to ask them what
happened."

"The
whole time the girl is smiling at me, licking blood off of her face and her
fingers. The interpreters trying to get information out of the two but they’re
not even paying attention. They’re just smiling and licking. Finally, the boy
looks at the interpreter and says something. You know what that bastard said?”

He pauses for
a minute thinking that it was a rhetorical question, and then he sees that the
old man is waiting for an answer. It’s as if the old man would end his story
right there if he didn’t give him an answer. For a second, he’s not even sure
if he wants to know the answer to the question. He’s not sure whether the old
Vietnam veteran sitting next to him isn’t just another crazy street bum whose
brains have been stirred a little too much.

He finds
himself asking, “What did he say?” He commits himself to the veteran’s story,
whether it’s sane or insane.

“Well, the
interpreter pauses for a bit, and then makes sure he understood what the guy
was saying. He looks at me, behind those army-issued eyeglasses, and then he
turns to the Sarge. He licks his lips before he says anything and then he says,
‘Delicious.’”

“Delicious?”
he found himself parroting in disbelief.

“Yeah,
delicious. Can you believe that shit?” The old veteran takes another cigarette
from his magic, never-ending pocket of hand-rolled cigarettes and lights it
before he continues.

“Sarge pulls
me aside to talk to me. He wants to know what we should do. I tell him, ‘There
ain’t nothin’ to do Sarge.’ He looks me in the eye and says, ‘You’re right
about that.’ We both knew how it was going to go down. There wasn’t no use
saying it. Saying the words out loud made it bad. Saying the words out loud
made it real.”

“Me and Sarge
walk back to the clearing where those two bastards are smiling up at us. We un-sling
our rifles, and we put two rounds through their smiling faces.”

The old man
holds his fingers out like an imaginary gun. “Blam! Blam!” After the second
blam he holds his fingers up to his lips and blows away imaginary smoke. “It
wasn’t a happy time. We didn’t feel good about it. There was a whole village of
bloodless dead people hanging from trees, but that still didn’t make us feel
any better. The sick shit was that those two people still had smiles on their
faces when they were dead. The back of their skulls were sprayed all over the
dirt of that village and they were smiling up at us like they were simply a
young couple posing for a photo.”

The old man
paused as if his story was over. He flicked his cigarette halfway across the
street and stared off into the darkness.

“That doesn’t
mean they were vampires. Shit, there’s lots of sick fucks out there, but that
doesn’t make them vampires.”

The old man
gave him a look, the type of look that wise old men find themselves giving to
young men who think they got it all figured out. “I ain’t done yet. Did I say I
was done?”

“No.”

“Then keep
your trap shut. I got to organize my thoughts. Did you ever try tellin’ a story
that’s thirty-five years old?” He shook his head. Hell, he wasn’t even thirty
yet. “Well, alright then. You just remember that the next time you feel like
you’re gonna tell me something I already know.”

“Where the
hell was I? Oh yeah, dead bodies, brains, and me. Anyhow, we phone in the
coordinates and the situation so no one thinks that we were the twisted
assholes that slaughtered a village. We kick some dirt over the bodies and we
take off. It wasn’t our mess in the first place and we had plenty of jungle to
cover. We figured it would be just as well that someone else took care of the
mess since we took care of the problem.”

“We get about
two clicks away from the village before night starts to fall and we decide to
make camp. The whole camp is quiet. No one feels like talking. There’s no
chatter about the life back home or what type of pussy we’re going to get when
we hit the world. We all close our eyes and nod off, except for the couple of
guys keepin’ watch, Deuce from New York and John from Utah. It’s funny, but
after a while all you remember about those people was their first names and
where they were from. I can’t even remember their faces anymore, Just Deuce
from New York and John from Utah. John was the Mormon guy I mentioned earlier.
Deuce was a big dumb bastard with a New York accent. He was a car guy, always
talkin’ about cars. I never knew nothin’ about cars really, so almost
everything that came out of his mouth sounded like gibberish to me.”

“These two
guys are on watch, and we go to sleep. I thought I’d have to struggle to go to
sleep, but if there’s one thing that marchin’ around a jungle is good for, it’s
fallin’ asleep. I dream about smiles and blood, and then it seems like no time
has passed at all, and I’m waking up to the sound of Sarge’s voice. He’s in the
middle of our camp and he’s talking louder than a person ought to talk when you’re
in a warzone. I’m confused because I was supposed to be woken up by Deuce for
my watch, but it never happened. I slept like a rock and he never came to get
me.”

“Sarge is
almost hysterical and all the guys are looking around like they’re expecting the
trees to come alive and get them. It turns out that, while we were sleeping,
someone snuck into camp and abducted five people from our unit. Deuce and John
are gone and three other motherfuckers. Sarge has us looking around the jungle
for these five missing soldiers. We don’t know if they all went of into the
jungle to have a circle jerk or if they cut loose and ran, so we have to look.”

“Less than
fifty yards away, we find ‘em. Strung up like those poor villagers. They’re
naked, they’re junk is cut off and all they’re gear has been thrown into a hole
filled with their own blood. We start lookin’ around to see if we can find a
trail. You know what we find?”

“What?”

“Two sets of
bloody footprints in the dirt. Not no NVA issue boots, not no wild animal prints,
just two sets of human footprints. We follow them for a few feet and then they
fade into the jungle like they never even existed.”

There's a long
pause as the Old Soldier lets his last words sink in. He takes a puff off of
his cigarette and stares off into the distance.

“Sarge flips
out. He’s screaming and yelling and everyone’s startin’ to lose their cool. We
decide we had better get back to base as soon as possible. We pack our shit and
start humpin’ it out of the bush. We all know what’s goin’ on but we don’t talk
about it. Everyone’s jumping at their own shadows. We move and move and we
don’t stop moving until we get back to base.”

“We started
with fifteen people and we came back with seven. We don’t know where the other
three went. When we set off walking there was ten of us. By the time we made it
back to base the other three had disappeared. I remember walkin’ and Sarge is
ten feet to my right. Next thing I know, I look over and he’s gone. I pause for
a few minutes and look around and I don’t see nothing… except for just a second
I swear I saw a face out in the woods, a female face, it was streaked with
blood and it was smiling at me.”

“Was it…” he
was unable to finish his question before the old man cut in.

“You’re
goddamn right it was her. I’m sure her fuckbuddy was out there too. She wanted
to be seen. It was like she was teasing me. I had blown her goddamn brains out
and there she was, a day and a half later, smiling her smile… and then it was
gone.”

            He
didn’t know what exactly to do when the old man had finished his story. Was it
rude to ask questions? Was it alright to press the man on things that he might
not even remember? How do you respond to a man that has just bared his soul and
the secret that he hadn’t shared with anyone for thirty-five years? He decided
to risk one question. “What did you do when you got back to the base?”

            “What
the fuck do you think we did? We lied our asses off. We told them that we had
been ambushed in the jungle and had to leave everyone behind. The higher-ups
didn’t quite believe us, but they didn’t have any proof either way, and we had
all gotten our stories straight so there wasn’t nothing they could do.”

            “The
fucked up shit is I got promoted to Sergeant. They wanted me to lead a squad of
men back into the jungle. As you can probably guess, I had myself an ‘accident’
soon after we got back to base and they were done asking all their questions. I
think most of the squad had ‘accidents.’”

            “There
wasn’t no way in hell I was going back into that jungle. I could feel them both
out there… waiting. At night, I saw eyes glinting back at me from the
perimeter. I tried to keep to the middle of the camp, to try and keep all those
eyes off of me.”

            “So
boy, when I say maybe you’re a vampire… I’m only half kiddin’… and the other
half of me is shit-scared.”

            He
took a final drag off of his cigarette and flicked it across the street to join
the others. A thin curl of smoke floated off into the streetlamp-lit sky,
marking its passage. The Old Soldier became lost in thought once again.

“The only
things I ever seen crave blood the way you were goin’ after it tonight is
leeches and vampires… and you don’t look like no leech.” He stood up and
straightened his back with a few audible pops. “Thanks for the food.” The old
man patted him on the knee and tottered off around the corner.

He sat there,
alone, pondering the old man’s parting words.
A vampire… ha!
That’s
ridiculous.
Still, he went home to his dark apartment and fell asleep just
as the sun came up.