Joe Vampire

POST 42



Monsters



After several unintended guest posts from my buddy Hube, we’re back to the Joe Show.

Sorry for the interruption, folks.

So maybe you’ve noticed it’s been longer than expected since my last post, and you’ve been desperately checking every day wondering when you’ll hear more of the fascinating details about my life. I don’t make any presumptions about that, but if you have, then thanks. We should grab a beer sometime. At this point, it’s possible that no one is reading my ramblings anymore, in which case it doesn’t matter how long between posts, and now I’m just talking to people who’ve Googled “pink dogs with huge hairy balls” but somehow ended up on a blog about a real-life vampire. Judging by the analytics, it’s happened more than once. Or maybe there’s been no one reading any of this from the beginning, and whoever’s on my followers list is only there because they like to see their little avatar show up online in as many different places as possible. I’ll just assume the truth lies somewhere among all of those possibilities. For the sake of continuing the narrative – and to add more sanity to my fading humanity – I feel like this post is necessary, even if it goes completely unread. Even if no one who isn’t in the forest isn’t there to not hear it not fall.

You know what I mean.

And I have a whole lot to stay in this one, so if anyone is indeed reading this I recommend comfortable seating and a tall glass of something alcoholic. It might help with the stomach-y parts when we get there.

It’ll help me, anyway… so I’ve got mine.

Up until recently, I was under the distinct impression that I’d become a vampire. I had all the symptoms, and if you’ve read any of the prior posts I won’t bore you with the list again. If you haven’t read them, I encourage you to check them out so maybe the rest of this post will make sense to you. But as deep in as I fell with the skin and the ears and the eyes and the fangs, and all the other superficial physical complications, it was the blood hunger that I worried about most, and the idea that under the most dire and unnatural of circumstances people would eventually become a food source for me. For as long as possible, staying slaked with uncooked animal flesh and coconut water in tetrapacks was enough to keep it all in check. I knew I’d been changed; I understood in simple, non-academic terms how the deed had been done. I was well aware of my situation, and no matter how loathe I was to admit it out loud, I really believed I had become a vampire. But I was mistaken.

I hadn’t become a vampire.

Not in the truest sense of the word, at least.

Apparently, as I’ve come to learn, you have to feed from a human being in order to seal the deal; until then, you’re just some sort of demi-ghoul, waiting to Become.

It was similar to how my family approached their Jewish faith. Come the holiday season they’re all over the dreidels and the knishes, but you couldn’t drag them into temple on a Friday night in June if you decked those halls with 52 inch plasma screens and overstuffed recliners. The same goes for me and my vampirism. Fang me out all you want and grow my ears into elf points if it makes you happy, but drinking human blood was a vanity I wasn’t willing to offer up on the altar. No one else needed to become a victim of my poor drunken judgment on a blind (and, as the name mix-up thing illustrated, hearing-impaired) group date, which started the whole ball rolling toward Vampiresburg in the first place. So, despite all evidence to the contrary, without having bagged myself a human feed I hadn’t really become a vampire.

But I have now.

And as hard as I fought it in the beginning, in some remarkable yet unintended way it ended up putting me at peace with things… though being on the other side of it, I think I would have been fine remaining in turmoil.

Good luck to me getting that genie back in the bottle.

The whole nasty tangle of complications started with my first Forever 81 rehearsal. I was so completely stoked for that, to be part of a band that wanted me as a player, not just a player who happened to be me. Per Lucas’ instructions, I met the guys at Damage, the bar where they first saw me play in the sex-laden sexagenarian plane crash that was my final gig with Vomiting Nonsense. They were all there, minus the Duran-wear, and rolling three drinks deep when I arrived. Lucas called out when he saw me at the door, “Joe… come toast yourself!” In my years with VN, I had never had a single occasion that called for Drinking as Celebration… the occasions always led to Drinking as Coping Mechanism for dealing with Lazer’s shit. So this was different. Good different. I took a glass of whatever was on the bar, which appeared to be expensive, by the design of the bottle. And by the fact that it had holographic specks floating in it. There may have even been a diamond at the bottom of my glass. “To Joe: Our missing piece – found at last,” he called out, to only me, Kyle and Jeremy, since there was no one else in the bar. Odd for evening hours, but with the money it sounded like these boys were throwing out for their record, I could easily see them closing down the bar so we’d have the whole space to ourselves to work out the new tunes they were coming up with. So, we drank. I tasted vanilla, honey and unapologetic privilege. “We’re practicing here, then? I’ll get my rig set up… ”

“Not here,” Kyle said. “Somewhere else. This is the pre-party.”

A pre-party for a rehearsal? What do they do before an actual show?

Lucas drained his glass. “Rehearsal space is a little more remote. We like to keep our secrets closely guarded in Forever 81.” Kyle agreed, then poured himself another shot. Jeremy just drank without saying much, which made sense seeing as how he’s the drummer.

Those guys are like monks sometimes.

“Secrets, huh?” Whatever was in my glass was potent. I was feeling the love after only two sips.

“Yep. We do secret shows, too. Stirs up the excitement for our fans.”

“Nice,” I agreed. “My old band had secret shows, too. Even when we told everyone about them, they still seemed to be… secret.”

Kyle and Lucas cracked up, which totally won me over. I love it when people enjoy my bashing on stuff I hate. Then Jeremy locked eyes with Lucas and broke his silence. “Yeah… secret rehearsals, secret gigs. Hidden agendas.”

Uh oh.

Lucas glared. “Don’t listen to that sulky guy over there.” It was the first time I’d heard him sound even remotely unfriendly. “He’s mad because he promised your spot to his cousin… which he should never have done without consulting the rest of the band. Right, Jeremy?” Jeremy’s answer was an angry snort.

“Ah. Band politics. I know all about those. That’s what ended my stint in my last band.” Lucas kept his gaze locked on Jeremy, and I realized that they really didn’t give a hang about my techno-sleaze rock and roll war stories. I drank more, feeling a familiar warm buzz that made me… droopy, is the only word I could think of to describe it. “So when are… we heading out… then?” Those holographic flecks were really taking the piss out of me.

Lucas was friendly again. “Just a few more minutes to celebrate. Jeremy will get your stuff loaded up.”

“I brought… my van… I can drive us.” Which clearly I couldn’t, in the state I was rapidly entering. “What arrrrre… we driiinking… anyway?” I don’t know if that’s how you spell what I was saying, but that’s what it sounded like in my head.

Lucas walked behind the bar, blurring through my line of sight. “It’s a little something I put together myself, for momentous events like tonight. One part marshmallow vodka… one part honey liqueur… three parts sake.”

Sake? Beautiful.

My first rehearsal with my new band, and the impression I would give would be that I was a limp-dick neophyte who couldn’t hold his booze, let alone play a freaking musical instrument afterward. I could hear everything I said slurring. “Duuude… sorrrry… I have a sort offff… bad reeeeaction to… saaaakeee.”

Lucas knocked back another round, and I guessed that he might not be drinking what I was drinking. “That’s probably the rohypnol I put in your glass.”

Rohypnol?

The f*cker drugged me.

“I donnn’t… geeeet iiit… ” Now I was totally done in. The last thing I heard before my lights dimmed completely was Lucas giving the instruction, “Put him in the van, and make sure the straps are good and tight.”

And then, I slept.

And then, I didn’t.

And then I was somewhere in between, awake enough to realize we weren’t going to be practicing music, not quite aware enough to realize I’d been duped through this whole thing. My dark-adapted eyes saw nothing, which means either the drugs and liquor had really done a number on my senses or I was in a really, really, really dark place. I couldn’t move despite repeated attempts to, so there was no chance of what Bo calls my WWE Super Strength helping me out. In my hovering mental state, I ran through the scenario as it seemed to have unrolled: I have no money, and they do, so they couldn’t have been holding me for ransom. And I’m not altogether sure my family would have paid for my freedom, anyway. I have nothing of value that these guys would want, unless they were after my Penthouse collection, and the pages of those weren’t coming unstuck enough for others to enjoy anytime soon. Besides: how would they even know about the collection? I’m sure they could buy as much porn as they wanted. My doped-up brain bounced back and forth like this the whole time I was… wherever I was. Based on the last thing I’d heard, I was in the back of my own van. I was starting to question whether they were really even musicians, and if I hadn’t seen them play at Damage on that fateful Iris-stained day, I would have said they weren’t. But if they didn’t want me for music, what were they after? I recalled a headline I’d read recently about people laying traps for farm workers using online want ads, offering employment and luring them to another state before murdering them for sport. No want ad in my case… just a personal reference from an unreliable source, the one who “recommended” me to Lucas in the first place: Lazer. Even in my haze, it came clear.

That a*shole was having me killed. He’d gotten Lucas and his meatheads to do it.

I must have really offended him with those cracks about his grandmotherly girlfriend.

So I drifted, faded, in and out for I don’t know how long. The sake and the roofie tag-teamed me, played with my sense of time and place until I didn’t have either anymore; everything was now, everywhere was here, and all of it was nowhere and nothing. The darkness didn’t help. At some point I must have blacked out all the way, and when I came to I was sitting upright, hooded and strapped into a chair from neck to waist with what felt like a thousand leather belts. At first I thought they might be acting out some sort of pre-execution four-way dude domination fantasy, but that delusion was probably just the last of sake doing my thinking for me. “Did you take his phone?” I heard Lucas ask through the hood. They didn’t know I was awake yet… not that it mattered. The only sense that had come back fully was my hearing.

“Got it.” That was Kyle.

“And is he completely tied down?” Lucas asked.

“Tight as I could get him,” Kyle told him. “He’s not going anywhere.” It was true. I felt like I was being flattened into a two-dimensional compression of myself.

“Yeah… and I remember how the other one tore through the straps right after you said that about him, so maybe let’s double-check everything, okay?” Holy shit. They weren’t amateurs. They’d done this to other people.

The one thing Lazer ever got right, as it turns out, is having me murdered.

Cocksucker.

Kyle tugged on every belt again, and I felt them cut into my skin on my arms… which meant my hoodie was gone. And I could feel that my Ray Bans weren’t in place anymore, either. I don’t know that it mattered, but those two items had become so much a part of my physical being that I felt sort of stripped without them. I heard Jeremy’s voice from a distance ahead of me. “Maybe we should just drop this one. He seems like a good guy… not like the other scum.” I tried to play drugged beneath the hood so I could listen to where this was going.

“They’re all scum,” said Lucas. “That’s why we do what we do.” So the nice guy stuff was just an act.

Obviously.

Kyle pulled on the strap at my throat, and I couldn’t help but choke from the pressure. At that point, they knew I was lucid. Then the hood came off, and my eyes were seared by the most excruciating, blinding white light I’ve ever seen. It was like staring into a thousand suns crammed onto the surface of a thousand other suns. That might be an overstatement. But it was very bright. You hear about people who go through traumatic events and how their minds shut down to keep from having to experience the horror of whatever it is they’re experiencing. That didn’t happen to me; it was quite the opposite, if anything. As soon as the light hit my eyes, something seemed to switch on in my brain. It could have been that I went into Vampire Survival Mode, or that the roofie had activated some dormant center of my brain that keeps record of bad shit going down for future reference. Whatever it was, I felt hyper-aware of everything that was going on, like my brain was recording it all in HD to process and use as needed to stay alive. They had me so strapped in and so drugged out of strength, all I could do was go through it. “Hello, Joe,” Lucas said.

I tried to make out his face, but he was nothing more than shadow in the blaze of the light behind him. “I take it we’re not going to rehearse, then.” Turns out I’m a smart ass even under the influence of date rape drugs and heavy cocktails. And even when in utter peril for my life.

“No. No rehearsal.” He dropped and put his face into mine. “We’re going straight to the big dance.” He stood up, and Kyle must have joined him because now there were two silhouettes in the light instead of one.

Having never been in a situation like this, I had no idea of the right thing to say. I did recall something my dad used to tell me, though it was less useful and more ironic than I would have wanted a memory to be at that particular moment. Whenever the Joe in me came out and I talked back to him, he’d tell me, “One day, someone is going to shut that smart mouth of yours – for good.” There was a very distinct chance that, if I wasn’t careful, this would be that day.

I hoped I could hold back.

“I don’t know what you guys have planned, but if this has to do with me calling Lazer’s girlfriend an old whore, then I’m ready to apologize to him.” That may have been a puss move on my part, but it was really a ploy to save my life, if that were even still possible. I figured in a situation like this, humility would be the best place to start.

“Lazer’s girlfriend is an old whore,” Lucas said.

“Oh. Glad to know I’m not the only one who sees it.” He just laughed at that.

I tried to clear my head – not an easy feat with the approximate sunlight scorching my vision and frying my head, and the effects of the drugs still lingering. And underneath those sensations, I began to feel a jittery sort of vibration in my bones. I had no idea how long I’d been out, but the last I had eaten was lunch on the day I left for Damage. If that was anything more than half a day past, I was going to need to feed soon, and I didn’t get the sense that they had a Coleman filled with beef tenderloin anywhere nearby. “So poor taste in lovers aside, I know Lazer and I have had our disagreements over the years, but I didn’t think I’d sinned so hard against him that he’d have me offed. How much did he have to pay you for this?” That may have been ill-advised, but if I had to try and worm my way out of an attempt on my life by Bennie and the Jets here, I deserved to know how little it was valued.

Turns out I was worth a pretty penny. But Lazer wasn’t the one footing the bill.

“He didn’t pay us, Joe,” Kyle said. “We paid him.”

Okay. Roofie or no roofie, my mind had just been blown. “Why would you pay him to kill me?” I tried as hard as I could to see inside those mulleted heads, but my own brain was so fried I just couldn’t do it.

Lucas leaned into my ear. “Because I know what you are, Joe… I know. Haven’t you been getting my e-mails?”

Shitf*ckdamn.

They weren’t from Lazer.

I knew that prick wouldn’t keep his mouth shut. “You went to all this trouble – you actually paid Lazer money – just to get to me because I’m a vampire?”

Lucas shook his head. “It wasn’t all about you, Joe; you’re an unexpected bonus. Sloppy seconds in the hunt for vampires, if you want to think of it that way. And Lazer was really just a pin in the map. Originally we were gunning for someone else. Show him, Kyle. Dim the light so he can see.” Kyle turned down the light, and unlatched a heavy metal box about the size of a lunch pail that reminded me of something I’d read in a book about serial killers, and how they’d carry around pieces of their victims… Kyle turned the box over, and the contents fell out at my feet with a thick splash.

And here’s where things got a little grisly for my taste.

Staring up at me from the floor, fangs bared and hair extensions in a matted web all around, was Don’s head.

It was semi-decomposed and coated with some kind of slimy fluid, like they had tried to preserve it somehow. The smell was horrendous. There was enough expression left on his face to see that whatever they had done to him before he died had been terrifying. I could feel myself heaving beneath the straps, but something inside of me wouldn’t let me look away from him, no matter how much I wanted to. I think I needed to see him, to look directly into the very literal face of my own coming fate. I’d gone from denying the vampire pieces entirely to letting them take me over for a while to striking a delicate accord with them and finally achieving balance. And here was Don, who may have ended up on the wrong side of his own vampire-to-human ratio, but he certainly hadn’t started out there. He was still a human being despite whatever vampirizing he’d been through.

And now, we’d be coming to the same end.

If Lucas enjoyed watching me squirm, he kept it close to the vest. “We came for him. We’ve been watching him for two years, letting him sell his shit from that warehouse he calls home, and waiting for the right moment to strike the f*cker down. Meanwhile, he made you.” He kicked the head aside and leaned into my face again. “How many have you made, Joe? How many other vampires will I have to smack in this town before it’s clean?”

I could smell his cologne, and his alcohol breath… and his blood surging beneath the veins in his neck. My head went dizzy. I thought about trying to lie my way through, but I could hardly gather the mental power to do it. “I haven’t bitten anyone,” I confessed.

“I don’t believe you.” He was reading my eyes, looking for tells that would let him know I was a full-fledged, balls-out vampire. “You’re too complete and clean-looking not to have fed on someone. And I’m betting you don’t know much about your power, so you might have even changed some of them… maybe all of them.” He stood up again. “I want to know how you do it, so I can find the others like you.”

So I told him. “Carrot juice, coconut water, raw beef. That’s it.” The bone vibration was getting worse.

“Carrot juice and coconut water,” he repeated. “He’s f*cking with us, Kyle. I’ll give you this much: you’ve got balls. But I don’t like being f*cked with.” Jeremy sulked off in the corner. A few times I caught his eye and tried to send him the desperation in mine. He just looked away. Kyle took over, though he kept a little more distance than Lucas had. “Don’t be a little bitch, Joe. Tell us all about your freakish ways… this guy victimized homeless dudes by getting them hooked on crank; who have you been using to get your vampire rocks off? Do you jump women in the park on their way home from work? Or maybe you know a bunch of goth punks who let you bite them for five bucks a pop? You must have changed someone, even if you only did it by accident.” I could smell the bitter tang of his fear every time he exhaled. Lucas had none of that in his essence.

Essence. I sound like one of the Nightfall kids.

“Nope. No one. I haven’t bitten anybody; I haven’t changed anybody.”

Lucas jumped in. “Don wouldn’t give anyone up either, but we knew he was lying, because here you are.” Wow. Don had stayed silent to protect me, even to his death.

Eye-opening, to say the least.

I tried to keep cool. “That was Don, not me.”

“Are you sure you want to stick with your original answer? Sooner or later, we’ll find another… and another. You’re like any other vermin; for each one of you I see on the street, there’s a dozen more running around in the gutter, climbing over everyone else’s shit and waiting to bring the rest of us down to your level. However many of you there are, I’ll find them all… no matter how long it takes.” Whoa. Someone’s been watching too much Buffy. But I knew this wasn’t bluster, even if I couldn’t read his mind. Don was proof enough of that. “You’re a little more put together than the drug dealer was… not quite as much of a depraved loser. He didn’t cooperate, and we had to cut his head off before we were able to reason with him. If you’re honest with us, we might show you a little mercy.”

The smell, the vibration, the leftover chemicals in my system – it was all starting to overwhelm me. Don’s head lying on the floor only made it worse. “Sorry, guys. I’m the only vampire I know.”

His face said he already knew something, and he was just trying to get me to say it first. “What about a woman named Louise… big reader, loves to knit, wears a lot of wool sweaters? Does that name light up the little green ball anywhere on your Vampire Buddy List?” Louise? How the hell did he know about her?

Was he a vampire, too? Was he seeing into my head?

Kyle threw in his piece. “Or maybe her friend Megan… pretty girl, like a model or something. I think you had some intimacy issues with her, didn’t you? Have you done your vampire thing all over her neck by now, turned her into a bloodsucker like you?”

I was afraid to say anything. Louise wasn’t just a guess, obviously, but Louise and Megan together were too direct a hit. It was at this point that I had my Sixth Sense epiphany, searching my tired memory for someone standing in the background of all these events like a spy in the House of Vampire. Maybe even Lucas himself, or Kyle or Jeremy, someone who had followed me everywhere, watching everything I’d been going through.

Just how long had these f*ckers known about me?

Lucas joined back in. “Or how about your ex-best buddy Hube? Sounds like you two had a pretty nasty confrontation a while back. Did you finally take out your resentment on him? Your hatred at him for being healthy, hearty and whole… and human, I believe was how you put it.” I stopped searching my memory for the outsider who might have been tailing me. And I dropped the thought that Lucas was able to read my mind. He didn’t need to.

Because I had told him all of those things myself.

“So you’ve been following the blog, then. Is that it?”

“Following it?” he scoffed. “Don’t flatter yourself. I broke into the damn thing and practically stole your worthless little identity so I could find you and get you taken care of. You left it wide open for any two-bit code cracker to shuffle his way into. Not too bright of you, Joe. You’re a smarter guy than that. Haven’t you ever heard of firewalls?”

Damn. Bo hadn’t been the only hacker on my trail.

“So you want to be a vampire killer. Why don’t you go after the homeless dudes, then? They’re all over the place down by Don’s loft.” That was shitty of me, to talk about them like they were nothing. Given the state I was in, I must have thought it was a perfectly allowable reach.

“We’re going for quality here, not quantity,” Lucas explained. “And those guys are a closed loop; they have no one, and nowhere to go. They’ll just keep biting each other until they’re all sucked dry. They’ll obliterate one another soon enough, and save us the hassle. You, on the other hand? You’ve assimilated, blended in… and monsters like you who hide among the good people will never be found if we don’t flush you out and crush you ourselves.”

What he said sounded plausible. I sort of broke then. “Someone’s going to notice I’m gone and come looking for me.”

Lucas smirked. “Like who – your parents? They have too much TV to watch to worry about you. Your sister is never around; she won’t even know about you until it’s far too late to find anything, even if she were to come searching. And Lazer’s not even your friend, so he’s out.” He actually had read the posts – even the not-so-dazzling ones. He must have known everything.

“Louise will. If I don’t show up for work, she’ll figure things out.” I said it like it was my ace in the hole.

Really, it was his.

“Let her come. Instead of two-for-one, we’ll have three. She’s next on our list anyway… and that’s thanks to you, too.”

“Hube will come, then.”

Kyle shook his head. “Not after the way you treated him. You can’t dick your friends around like that and expect they’ll come running to your rescue when you need them most. I’d be surprised if he even gives a shit that you’re gone. That blows your whole list.” For a second, I bought what the two of them were saying. But only for a second; something clicked after that. They hadn’t read my last post.

They didn’t know Hube and I had a dude date for lunch.

And it sounded like they might not know about Bo, either. His blog security must have kicked in just before those posts went up.

As difficult as it was, I kept my mouth shut about them both. “So what, then? I don’t have any other vampire friends to turn you on to, and even if I did I wouldn’t tell you about them. So what are you going to do now – kill me like you did Don? Chop my head off and blame it on a drug cartel?”

The light came back on. My eyes sizzled. “No, Joe,” Lucas said. “You’re not a drug dealer, so that wouldn’t fly on the six o’clock news. Instead, you’re simply going to disappear. You’re practically a recluse as it is, so it wouldn’t be a huge leap in logic if you were to sign off on your blog one last time, from a remote, unnamed location, explaining that the blood lust got the better of you. You’ll be living out your days in some no man’s land, sulking through your pathetic everlife in peace. No more blogging the truth about vampires, no more witty insight from friendless, f*ckless, hopeless Joe Vampire.” Okay… that was actually kind of clever. “And behind the scenes, what no one will really know is that we – Kyle, Jeremy and I – kept them safe from a monster like you, and other monsters coming down the line… by testing all the ways we might be able to kill a vampire. On you.” Wow.

These bastards were really sick.

“All you have so far is decapitation?” Probably not smart to taunt the executioner.

Lucas shrugged, and I heard Kyle slink away. “It worked, but it was messier than we wanted it to be. We need a variety of methods.” Then Kyle came back lugging a trunk behind him, and the light dimmed.

I think they wanted me to see everything they were going to do.

Lucas flipped open the trunk and pulled out a stake made of stainless steel. He spun it around like he was gearing up for a knife fight. “We tried this one on your friend, but I think we might have missed his heart.”

This was when the smart mouth thing snuck up on me again. “Yeah, those can be hard to find if you’re too f*cking stupid to tell left from right.”

Real bright, Joseph.

Lucas raised the stake, and I watched wide-eyed as he stabbed it down with considerable force. It split one of the leather straps on the left side of my chest and plunged into my shoulder, cleanly through any flesh and bone that stood in its way, and planted itself in the wooden back of the chair. I had no idea I could howl like I did; I hardly recognized the sound as having come from my own throat. “It’s still a useful tool if you need to pin your specimen in place.” He pulled another one from the trunk and took care of my right shoulder.

The vibrating worsened. I was reaching for the strength I had when Bo and I were going at it; even half of that would have been helpful. But there was nothing. I saw Jeremy in the distance, disappearing into the darkness.

Kyle came back into view, this time with a tripod and a digital camcorder that he set up off to the side of their torture station. “We have another bunch of slick ways to take care of you,” Lucas told me, “We’re going to try them all, one by one, documenting the results as we go. But we need you fully functional, not half-bombed. So you’ll rest now.” He pulled something else from the shadows, something moving. “And you’ll need to keep up your strength – not too much, though, Tiger. We don’t need you going off half-cocked. We just need you strong enough to recognize your own suffering.” He stepped into the light and showed me a live rat cradled in his hands. With no second thought about it, he twisted its head and snapped its neck, then set the twitching corpse on my chest just below my chin. “Suck on that when you get hungry. We’ll see you in a while.”

Just when I thought things couldn’t get any grosser.

I could see clearly now what they were trying to do. This wasn’t just about figuring out ways to kill me; they wanted the Vampire Within to come out and play so they could justify murdering me. They thought plying me with blood would raise my vampire hackles enough to spark a reaction. And theirs was the upper hand; I had no brisket to suck on, no sports drink handy to balance out my electrolytes. The vibration, I knew now, was the hunger rising, and it was the worst feeling I’ve had since Crap Fest. The sensation of coming out of my own skin had become constant and continuous. It felt like I was dying all over again, but this time with my consciousness intact the whole way. And all I had to feed on was a dead rat lying on my chest.

It was the first time since This happened that I hadn’t been able to take care of myself or keep things under my own control.

More than being tortured or possibly even being killed, this, to me, was true terror.

I came to understand how someone like Don, someone who hadn’t managed his condition from the beginning, would resort to drug use to dull the sensation. I could feel the vampire parts trying to claim the rest of me, whatever Joe parts I’d been able to keep whole by sheer will and Louise’s sage advice. The Joe parts were fighting back with what little might they still had, but I knew they weren’t strong enough in this condition to go the distance. In all of our conversations, Louise and I had somehow failed to cover what might happen if a vampire refuses to feed, even from the blood of lesser animals. Maybe it all comes down to some version of re-death; maybe there was something even worse waiting for me down the line. Either way, there wasn’t a chance in hell I’d feed in front of these jags, no matter how dicey it got.

I was, to put it in my own terms, up shit creek without a bottle of coconut water.

But after all the work I’d done to keep this f*cking impulse at bay, I wasn’t about to give them the satisfaction of watching it all come undone.