Unmade: A Neo-Nihilist Vampire Tale (20 page)

“We want some
information and you’re going to give it to us.” His voice was cold and his
heart was colder. This was the goal. This was the stepping stone. It wasn’t a
girl that trembled and shook in his arms. That was all a show, a front.

“What
information?” Her squirming and fear lulled for a second, as she understood
that there might be a way out of the madness, a light at the end of the tunnel.

“I want you to
tell me about them… the vampires?”

“What the hell
are you talking about?”

A speck of
doubt crept into his mind. The Old Soldier egged him on, shoving his doubt into
the corner of his mind. “Hit the bitch! Slap her across the chops!”

He raised his
hand back and hesitated unsure of whether to hit her or not and then he brought
his hand down on the side of her face. “Tell me what I want to know, or it’s
just going to get worse. What do you call yourselves?”

She bled from
the lip now and her words were slow, “Who? Who are you talking about?”

“The people
like you. What are you called?”

She looked at
him fearing for her life and uncomprehending. “Goths? Do you mean Goths?”

The Old
Soldier stood off to the side waiving the knife around as if he were carving
her from a distance. “Is that what you call yourselves? Goths?”

‘Goths,’ the
word tickled the back of his mind with something smacking of familiarity.
“Right. Goths. Where do the Goths hangout? Where can I find more of you Goths?”

She shook her
head, not understanding the question. As he raised his hand for another slap
she spit out an answer that she hoped would satisfy him. “Goths hang out
everywhere. They’re all over the place.”

He lowered his
hand at her apparent acquiescence and refined his question a little more. “If I
wanted to meet some of you Goths, where would I meet them?”

Blood from her
lip dribbled down her chin and he could see the lines between his fingers on
her cheek where a reddish bloom had appeared. “A lot of Goths go to the Glasshouse
during the week. They have a bar and play industrial music and its pretty laid
back. On Sunday’s all the Goths that I know go to Beelzebub’s.”

“Thank you for
the information.” He felt relief at not having to slap her across the face
again. The Old Soldier’s bouncing rage was on edge and he was glad that she had
answered his question promptly. He hoped she did the same for the next
question. “Where is your partner from the stage show at Beelzebub’s?”

Her
slap-addled brain tried to understand why he was asking her the question. Why
did he want to know about her friend? Her eyes darted between him and the Old
Soldier and she finally figured out the answer. The old man with his knife, the
meeting at Beelzebub’s, it all made sense.

“You killed
Earl!” The look on their faces was all the answer that she needed. “You’re the
motherfuckers that killed Earl!” She struggled against his hold, attempting to
break free.

He brought his
hand across her face again. The struggling did not stop. The Old Soldier moved
in for a little support and placed the blade of the knife across her pasty
white throat. “Tell us what we want to know, bitch.” He spoke in a cool voice laced
with threat.

She kept her
head still and only her eyes moved in his direction. Her jaw set and a wad of
dry spittle erupted from her lips, landing on the Old Soldier’s face. “I’m not
going to tell you shit.”

The Old
Soldier’s head drooped and he walked smoothly to her side, drawing a thin red
line across her throat with the blade of the knife. Blood trickled at a slow but
unstoppable pace from the wound that he had created. The Old Soldier whispered
in his ear before leaning on the rail that overlooked the river. “Do your
business.”

He placed his
lips across the copper haired girl’s throat. The flavors sprung to his mind
immediately along with a tinge of fear and sadness. She made coughing noises as
he slurped on her throat, wiggling his tongue in between the tight lips of the
cut. She did not die as quickly as Earl. Her struggles were pretty fierce, no
match for his strength, but pretty fierce nonetheless. The slow pace of his
feeding was actually pretty enjoyable, the flavors came at a rate that was less
hectic and intense and he still had his wits about him, when her heart stopped.
Her eyes glazed over and he ripped open her shirt. He took one of his newly
whittled stakes and drove it through her heart, hitting home on the first try.
He gave her one final kiss through tear-stained eyes and then the Old Soldier
tipped her legs up over the railing and dropped her into the Columbia. Her
copper hair fanned out in the filthy river water like a lily pad. Soon, the
current had stripped her away from the side of the river and out until the
middle, where she looked like nothing more than a log.

            They
stumbled back from the waterfront like two drunks. His eyes leaked tears
uncontrollably, and truth be told, he didn’t want to control them. The Old
Soldier walked at his side, silent but thrumming with the adrenaline of the
slayer. His steps wobbled with barely controlled excitement, just as his
friend’s slogged with pointless direction. They made the fifteen block trek to
the apartment in timeless time, the scenery rushing by as if on a movie screen.

            When
they got inside, they assumed their regular positions, the Old Soldier squatted
on the floor with a beauty in hand. He flipped up the lid of his coffin and
laid inside on the prickly slivers of wood.

            The
Old Soldier puffed silently on his cigarette as the thoughts flowed in his
friend’s mind. He didn’t entirely like what he was seeing. The boy’s reaction
was far different than what it had been for Earl. Sure, he wasn’t too keen on
killing, and that was good, but if he wanted to make everything alright, he was
going to have to nut up pretty soon. There was no time for tears, no time for
doubts. That time was over. Now all that was left was the killing.

            “You
alright, kid?”

            The
coffin was silent and he heard the tobacco in his cigarette crackle as he took
another puff off of his beauty. “Kid?”

            “Yeah,
I’m alright,” the kid's voice sprouted from the box, nasally and coated in
snot.

            “If
you’re alright, why the hell are you sitting in that coffin, sniveling like a
five-year-old girl that’s just been told she can’t have a pony?” It wasn’t the
smoothest way to put it, but smooth was for the others. Smooth was for people
that still had tomorrows in front of them, not the majority behind them.

            “Do
you think we’re doing the right thing? I mean, the books say ‘Be prepared for
anything.’ They don’t say, ‘Be prepared for them to look, act and feel just
like humans.’ Do you know what I mean?”

            “The
right thing? That’s a pretty relative thing, don’t you think? Is it right to
kill people? If you went out and asked Joe Schmoe, he’s most likely gonna say
that any killing is wrong. Ask someone from a concentration camp and they’ll
tell you that killing is wrong too. They’ve seen it. They’ve felt it. But if
you ask them what they would do if they were standing next to Hitler before the
war and they had a gun in their hands… well, you can fill in the blank
yourself.” He took another puff off of his cigarette before he spoke again,
“The fact is, these people are killing people. These people killed you. They
took your death away from you. You couldn’t die if you wanted to die. There’s
no ‘natural causes’ for your ass anymore. You’re gonna die by the stake or
nothing. Is it right to kill the people that killed you?” He paused for a
second before answering his own question. “If killin’ your killers ain’t right,
then I don’t know what is.”

            There
was no noise or movement from the coffin, and then the kid's hand reached out
pulling the coffin lid tight and shrouding the interior in darkness.

            The
Glasshouse was a dive club on the east side of Portland. It was located just on
the other side of the train tracks that ran next to the river. From the
outside, it was nondescript. There was a large square parking lot in front of
the building. In order to get inside, you had to walk up a long ramp that
sloped upward until it met the front door of a plain white warehouse. The
inside of the warehouse was outfitted in gaudy wares; pictures of carnival
freaks lined the walls and violent murals were painted in all of the blank spaces.
There was one of a pale-faced man with slicked-back hair that particularly
interested him.

            The
man’s face hung over the bared neck of a scantily clad woman, its pointed teeth
dripping blood. It was the first sign that maybe he was on the right track.

            Certainly,
the clientele of the Glasshouse were a little more what he was looking for than
the people that frequented Beelzebub’s. People dressed in black wandered from
place to place. Many of them wore a thick layer of white makeup to make their
faces pale. There were all colors of people in the bar and they wandered to and
fro socializing and engaging in fake bouts of laughter.

            He
stood against the wall nursing his drink. The bar was busy enough so that the
presence of a one-drink carrying man with a staring problem wouldn’t be
noticed. Occasionally, he would look to his right and see the looming head of
Dracula smiling out at the crowd from the flat surface of the wall. He wondered
if there really was a Dracula? Was he still alive, spreading his disease like a
Jehova’s witness, unwanted and unsolicited?

            A
man of gigantic size walked past him. His skin was paler than the others and he
had a tribal tattoo covering half of his face. He smiled at someone across the
room, exposing pointed teeth similar to the teeth that Dracula had in the
painting at his side. He sized him up mentally and figured that he would
probably be a little harder to kill than most of the other people in the room.
This was the first time he was going to be going up against a male vampire, and
he wanted to kill one of the men that didn’t look like they could kick his ass.
He was done with killing women for a while. He had told the Old Soldier as much
as they made the hike across the city. The Old Soldier tried to convince him
that the things they were killing were neither women nor men, but animals, a
different species altogether. He said, “You’re not killing a vagina or a penis,
you’re killing some blood-sucking, murderous freaks who are intent on killing
innocent people, or at the very least, making those people’s lives a living
nightmare.”

            The
Old Soldier’s analysis made a sort of bizarre sense, but he still didn’t have
it in him. Maybe in a few nights he could do the job, but not tonight. Tonight
a man would die. He wondered if sucking blood from a man was considered gay. It
didn’t really matter he supposed. If he was a blood-sucking freak like the Old
Soldier had inadvertently implied, he supposed there were certain things that
didn’t apply to him anymore. Being gay was probably one of them. He wasn’t gay,
he didn’t think, and if he felt like having sex it would most definitely be
with a woman, a woman like the one he had killed last night, or as the Old
Soldier would have said “exterminated.”

            He
refocused his mind, opening, his eyes, refining his perception and scanning for
a likely mark/vampire. He was amazed at the somberness of the crowd in the
club. It was full of almost exclusively Goths as they liked to call themselves.
They sat or stood in groups of four or five, talking seriously and almost never
smiling. When they did laugh, it was a hollow sound that carried a little too
far to be genuine, the exaggerated tossing back of their heads as they laughed
didn’t help the picture any.

            He
spied one group of people engaged in the aforementioned lifeless banter. They
huddled in a circle, sipping from their drinks occasionally. He couldn’t hear
what they were saying; the low voices of the group were drowned out by the
semi-loud industrial music that filled the place. He wondered why they would
even sit there hanging out with each other if they weren’t having a good time.
He thought that going to the bar to be sad should be a solitary thing. People
can handle seeing a lone sad man, they don’t really like to see groups of sad
people; it makes them feel uncomfortable and self-conscious of their own
happiness. Then again, that didn’t seem to be a problem. There were very few
riotous personalities here. They looked like an army waiting for battle, but
with nothing to fight for. Their uniforms were dark clothing, with rips, or
chains, or leather straps swinging and jingling in every direction. Their pale
faces floated in the dark interior of the bar. The pictures of smiling carnival
freaks smiled down at their strange uniforms, laughing and wondering who the
real freaks were.

            He
refocused his attention on one man in the group that he had been watching. The
man was lithe, his arms look liked plain bone underneath the velvety black of
his skintight shirt. His lips were lined with silver piercings that reflected
the light of the bar. His face was gentle and womanly, and he too wore eye
makeup like the copper-haired girl he had killed the night before. What was her
name? He had forgotten everything but the color of her hair. This man too had
copper-colored hair and for the first time, he wanted someone to die. He wanted
to slice this man to pieces, to make him pay for all of the things that he had
had to do in the last few weeks. This man now became the focus of his rage, his
hurt, his confusion.

            He
stood staring from the dark recess of the wall next to the glowingly pale face
of Dracula, eyeing the man for most of the night. Finally, around 1:30 in the morning, the group decided to break-up. The women of the group, two of them,
split, then one of the men left. The two remaining people, including his mark
bellied up to the bar. They talked for a few minutes and then shook hands. His
mark turned around to leave and he followed.