Unmade: A Neo-Nihilist Vampire Tale (23 page)

He walked to
the back of the living room and peered around the corner, looking down the
hallway… there were two doors on the left side of the hallway and two doors on
the right… pictures of unfamiliar faces hung on the walls, smiling faces full
of teeth. He could hear faint noises coming from the room on the left at the
end of the hallway. He moved slowly, the wall seeming to crawl by him, faces
flashing for brief seconds, ghosts of the living.

The first door
he came to was on the right, he dropped to his knees to look underneath the
doorway. No light came from the room so he slowly opened the door. He found the
tall dude lying on his bed with his feet hanging off. The light from the
hallway splashed on the back of the man’s legs, but went no further. He was
lying on his stomach with his face buried in a pillow

.           The
man must have sensed his presence because he managed to mumble in his pillow,
“No, no more shots… I have to sleep.”

            He
rushed at the sleeping man with his knife held point down, and drove it through
the man’s neck, he felt the resistance of vertebrae, and then the knife made it
through the other side with hardly a sound… like stabbing a watermelon, only instead
of breaking through the rind, you have to break through a neck. The man’s legs
kicked and spasmed for a few seconds and then he rolled him over on his back.
His eyes stared into space, dark and empty, his mouth open and contorted in
pain, blood ran in two diverging rivers down the sides of his neck where the
knife had gone all the way through transforming the white sheets into blooms of
crimson.

            He
backed out of the room and prepared himself for the next room, which was the
first door on the left. A do not disturb sign, stolen from a Motel 8 apparently,
hung on the doorknob. He turned the knob and a sliver of red light jetted into
the hallway… he hissed slowly as he opened the door, silently cursing himself
for not checking for light. Nothing happened immediately so he continued to
open the door… taking his time. As the door was opened just enough for him to
get his head through, he heard a voice from the other side of the door ask,
“Coming to join me, Johnny?”

            He
reached his hand in and flicked off the light switch next to the door… and then
he threw the door open… the light from the hallway blinded the woman on the
bed, dressed only in a pair of black panties with one hand down her pants
working her stuff like a Rubik’s Cube. He advanced on her and she leaned her
head back and closed her eyes, rubbing her stuff with her free hand faster and
more violently, lost in lust and pleasure. He moved to stand next to her while
she masturbated on the bed. Her head was at just the right height so just for
fun he unzipped his pants, fast enough so that it made that trademark zipper
sound. Without opening her eyes she closed her mouth around his hard steel,
giving a violent slurp, which quickly turned to pained shock. Her eyes shot
open and her mouth began to ooze blood. She looked down to see that it wasn’t
Johnny’s cock she had been sucking on, but the tangy metal of his knife. She
coughed on the blood that was oozing from her tongue and she tried to get up
off the bed, her arms flailing and her mouth open in an “O” of silent pain. He
grabbed her by the hair on the back of her head and flung her down on the bed,
and just as she thought to scream for help, he brought the knife down, a quick
shhh of the knife and her screams were no more. She continued to kick and bleed
for some time her breasts jiggling like bowls of Jell-O, interesting to watch
but he was still glad when it was over… her hair had been quite oily and her
pussy had a definite unpleasant odor to it.

            He
zipped up his pants with his non-oily hand and wiped it on the sheets of the
woman’s bed. The red light splashed the walls gruesomely showing pewter frames
of pale smiling faces posed in fake smiles. He moved to the hallway again as
the noises from the last room on the left began to intensify. There were two
people in that room, engaged in something sexual if he wasn’t mistaken, the
trademark sound of nuts slapping on an ass and moans of pleasure. He readied
himself for what was going to come next. He stalked down the hallway placing
one foot in front of the other, methodically placing each heel and rocking to
the toe of his foot. The door inched ever closer and then he was standing in
front of it, looking at cheap wood, lazily painted white with dried runs of
paint bulging out from the flatness of the door.

            Slowly
he opened the door to see the bunching buttocks of a man busy thrusting his
junk into a woman on all fours. Their backs were to him, so he crept up behind
the man, his long stringy black hair cascading over his shoulders and sweat
dripping down his spine. With the speed of a humming bird he leapt to the man’s
side and cut off his penis in mid thrust, the man’s face turned to him pained and
furious and that’s when he thrust the knife through his eye. It felt like a
fork going into some cheese until it reached the optical nerve bundle at the
back of the eye and then it was like trying to puncture a tennis ball with a
butterknife. The man’s body shook and for a second it looked like he was still
trying to fuck the air with his stump of a penis and testicals covered in
blood.

            The
woman scrambled off of her knees and flipped into a sitting position on her
butt. She scrabbled backwards leaving her man’s blood stains all over the
sheets, and as she bumped up against the wall she looked down at herself with
growing horror. With the dexterity of a junky going through d.t.’s, she reached
between her legs and pulled the man’s limp penis from her vagina, its hardness
sapped by blood loss. She managed to scream once… not the unintelligible scream
of horror that you see in the movies, but a deep, frantic scream for help that
rattled the walls and forced him into action. He dove across the bed with his knife
held out in front of him and drove it through her mouth and out the back of her
head, pinning her against the wall… and yet she still screamed, until he
wrapped his hands around her throat and squeezed. Still he could feel the
pressure of her lungs trying to gasp for air to let out more of those horrid
screams. He choked and crushed with his hands like vices, and her eyes wiggled
around trying to find anything to help her, and finding nothing she began
bashing him in the face with her fists, silver rings bringing forth cuts and
gashes like he was having his face scrubbed with a wash cloth filled with
broken shards of glass. He closed his eyes to avoid any ocular damage and to
get away from the panicked stair of the woman he was strangling. She changed
from punching him to clawing, which faded to even weaker slaps, and finally devolved
into a soft caress. It reminded him of his wife, when they used to lay in bed…
until he opened his eyes and he saw the woman’s brutal stare and her face
contorted in rage around the hilt of his knife. He let go in an experimental
fashion and he jumped as a last bit of trapped, but lifeless, air escaped her
crushed throat. As he stood up, he watched the man’s severed penis shrivel like
a slug in the sun.

            He
wandered through the hallway past the obituary pictures of the dead, their eyes
seeming to follow him with disapproving stares. He walked past the stubs of
melted down candles in their pewter sconces, red runs of wax hardened in
mid-drip. He opened the door with the exhaustion of a marathon runner leaning
on it and heaving with the abusive feel of adrenaline in his muscles and blood
running down his face from a multitude of scratches. The Old Soldier was there
waiting, his eyes wide. He glanced around like an old timey villain, his hands
clasped together, kneading each other.

            “It’s
done,” he managed to spit.

            The
Old Soldier grabbed the old bowling bag and walked into the house, like a
plumber ready to fix some pipes.

            “Jesus
Christ boy, I told you to be quiet about it. What was that last noise? Sounded
like a Saint Bernard raping a Chihuahua.”

            As
he leaned down to pull the corpse inside, he said, “The last one was a
screamer.”

            The
Old Soldier took in his surroundings and then opened up the bag, pulling out a
stake and handing it to him as he took one himself.

            “Well,
where are they… we don’t want to be here all night and it’s already pretty
late.”

            They
walked back into the rooms, burying wood in the hearts of the dead… ignoring
the pictures of carnage as if they were just planting flowers instead of
mutilating the deceased. When they got to the last room, the Old Soldier let
out a “Jesus” but said nothing else. He almost fell over backwards when he was
removing the knife from the wall… “Must have hit a stud,” was all he said.

            As
they were packing up, the last door on the right side of the hall opened up and
a set of tiny eyes dressed in pajamas peered up at them. Neither of them knew
what to do, so they simply stood there as the boy walked into the room with the
dead couple. The boy rubbed his eyes, and his lower lip started trembling. He
turned to look at the two of them, terrified and sad at the same time and then
he ran past them and into the room where the other woman lay topless and bloody
with a stake through her heart. The boy’s plaintive wail broke the stillness of
the moment and he ran into the room to see the boy curled up with his mother,
oblivious to the bloodstains that were soaking his Pokemon pajamas. A thin
thread of drool ran from his mouth as he clutched his mother’s cold body, and
the boys tears diluted the blood that was coagulating on her neck. The boys
cries became louder, more intense, until they seemed to echo off of the walls…
he pulled out his knife out from the makeshift leather sheathe.

            He
could hear the Old Soldier behind him… “No, don’t…”

            But
it had to be done, he plunged the knife into the boy’s neck at the base of his
skull, giving it a quick twist. He put his mouth over the wound at the back of
the kids neck and enjoyed the rich rush of flavors that came from the kid. His
experience was much simpler, less refined… the flavors of hamburgers, hot dogs,
a Happy Meal, cake, and ice cream… all those happy foods you could get away
with gorging on when you were a kid. He didn’t want to let go, but he did. The feeding
came to a stop and he walked over to the Old Soldier whose mouth hung open, one
hand clutching at the inside of his pocket for one of his beauties and the
other limply holding onto the old bowling bag full of stakes.

            “Give
me one,” he said. The Old Soldier simply looked at him, still fumbling for a
cigarette.

            “You
can’t… he’s just a boy…”

            “What’s
done is done, but we need to finish what we started.”

            “You
shouldn’t have killed him… you didn’t have to kill him.” The Old Soldier kept
rambling on about “shouldn’t” and “didn’t have to” so he just reached into the
bag at the Old Soldier’s side and pulled out a stake, annoyed at the old man’s
sudden weakness. He jammed it in, just like he would have for an adult and the
stake went all the way through the boy’s scrawny chest to stick out the back,
pinning him to his dead mother, the way his head was twisted, it looked as if
he was breast feeding.

            “There,
it’s done… now let’s get the hell out of here.” The Old Soldier stumbled along
after him, tears in his eyes, as he polished up the place, removing
fingerprints… and fingers with his skin underneath the fingernails on them.
When he was done he wrapped the fingers covered in silver rings in wads of
toilet paper and shoved them into the old bowling bag. The Old Soldier dropped
the bag after he did this, and he had to carry it himself. They left as
silently as they had came, a house with an unlocked door and six mutilated
bodies… six more vampires that wouldn’t be killing anyone else, repaid for all
the brutality and pain that they had caused. It was a good night.

            It
was about four in the morning and the summer sky had begun to lighten in the
east. They had to hurry if they wanted to get back to the apartment before the
sun came up. At least there wouldn’t be a maze of police cars and searchlights
to traverse. The way home was just as clear as when they had come. Silence took
over the heat of the night as the wind picked up ruffling their hair like two
triumphant souls standing on the top of a mountain. He wondered what type of
flag he would plant in the top of a mountain; isn’t that what mountain climbers
did? Take their little flag and jab the wooden stick it was attached to into
the pristine snow.

            The
Old Soldier hobbled along, much less drunk than he had been earlier. The
streets were empty except for the occasional gust of wind driven paper and the
scrape of their shoes on the streets.

            The
Old Soldier looked at him and stopped, while he kept on walking. “Kid, I don’t
think I can do this anymore.”

            They
were standing on the corner of Grand and Burnside, just a couple of blocks
before where the Burnside Bridge started.

            He
stopped and turned around at the Old Soldier’s words, equal parts surprised and
pissed off. “What do you mean you can’t do this anymore?”

            The
Old Soldier paused before he answered, pained and reticent. “That kid was just
too much, I don’t think what we’re doing is right anymore. Jesus, he was just a
kid.”

            “Don’t
you know that nits make lice? Don’t you know that a little bastard like that
could grow up to be the worst of the bunch? We did that fucker a favor, and
you’re bitching out on me because of it?”