Just Another Brick in the Wall
CRUNCH! Yep, no matter what way you put it, being hurled through a wall hurts.
It’s funny – just a few short months ago I would have argued that the dreaded atomic wedgie was the most common indignity I had suffered throughout my life. That’s not such a bad thing, especially when one considered that the proportion of ass-crack related incidents in one’s existence tended to decrease dramatically post high-school. After all, most people just won’t give a wedgie to another grownup.
Why? Well, my personal theory was that part of becoming an adult meant that we started asking ourselves much deeper questions than when we were kids, such as: do I really want to put my hands where this person’s dirty ass has been?
That being said, getting thrown into, and sometimes through, solid objects was becoming a disturbingly common occurrence in my life as of late. Considering the overall painfulness of such experiences, I began to find myself oddly nostalgic about having my underwear bunched up my ass by some prankster.
Just in case you’re taking notes, brick and concrete were easily the least fun barriers I had been smashed into. However, your basic wooden load-bearing wall – which oddly enough was what I found myself plowing into at that moment – wasn’t exactly a vacation in the Caribbean either. If this kept up, I might have to consider starting a blog about all the scenic walls in the Tri-State area and what it felt like to be flung through each and every one of them.
Although, perhaps right then wasn’t exactly an ideal time to think about blogging. I was just starting to pull myself back to my feet when a dark, angry form emerged from the shadows. It was Samuel, the leader of a coven of vampires from Queens that called themselves the HBC. This was because their home territory included the Howard Beach area. It was a stupid name, but considering my own group was known as Village Coven – due to being headquartered in fucking SoHo – I was probably in no position to throw stones.
It was apparently a tradition to name covens after their territories. Sure, you wound up with some silly names. I had even heard there was a Scotrun Coven in Pennsylvania, which was bad for them because they would forevermore be known in my mind as the Scrotum Coven.
All things considered, though, it probably beat the alternative. If every group were given free rein for names, I have little doubt we’d wind up with dopey crap like The Blood Brotherhood, The Midnight Raiders, or maybe The Sons of Darkness. In short, we’d all sound like retarded local chapters of the Legion of Doom.
Trust me, I speak from experience here. My own coven had a rule not too long ago regarding taking new personal pseudonyms upon joining. As a result, we ended up with stupid shit like people calling themselves Rage Vector, Night Razor and, of course, Dr. Death. Taking all that into account, I could probably live with Village Coven.
Still, worrying about minor things like coven names was probably best left to moments when I wasn’t in danger of getting my head torn off. This was not such a time. Samuel leapt at me, no doubt going for the kill.
Well, okay, maybe that’s a bit obvious. After all, one typically doesn’t fling themselves through the air at people they’re having a polite conversation with. Fortunately for me, I may not be able to dish it out as well as others, but I can definitely take it.
See, I’m a vampire, too – in case you hadn’t figured that out yet. I also had a lot of aforementioned experience getting tossed around. You built up a tolerance to it after a while. Those two things combined allowed me to recover quickly enough to snatch a busted two-by-four from the rubble of the safe house wall I had just smashed through. Before Samuel could fully cover the distance, I swung the beam and connected with a solid KAPOW. He went flying back into the shadows from whence he came. That gave me a breather, but I didn’t have any delusions that it would be nearly enough to finish him.
I had been told that Samuel was nearly two-hundred years old. As vampires tended to get stronger as they get older, that made him both a lot more powerful as well as much more experienced than me. Neither was a checkmark in my favor. Under different circumstances, I should have probably been counting my lucky stars that I was still standing. If this had been my first tussle with a vampire way out of my league, I’d probably be busy either begging for my life or kissing my ass goodbye. However, it wasn’t.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m no Chuck Norris, and this fight was a long ways from being decided in my favor. However, once you’ve been in one pissing match with a monster who outclassed you in nearly every way and lived (sorta) to talk about it, you started to get a little jaded about the whole thing.
It’s like when I was a little kid. I remember watching wrestling on the TV and listening to Mean Gene Okerlund talking about how any given wrestler on any given night could potentially become the new champ. It wasn’t too different from what I was doing now. No matter how old the vampires, things weren’t one-hundred percent settled until one was dust.
Of course, that logic ignored the fact that professional wrestling was bullshit. Unfortunately for me, I didn’t have Vince McMahon off behind the scenes scripting a big upset victory. If I wanted to win this, I couldn’t count on “Stone Cold” Steve Austin running out to save my ass with a steel chair.
Fortunately, I still had a few tricks up my sleeve, one of them being that I had my wits about me. Samuel might’ve been much older, but he had a major weakness that I could exploit. According to the info I had been given, he was old enough to have been born a slave in the deep South before the days of the Civil War. He had been owned by an exceptionally cruel master and spent the first four decades of his life enduring a mix of excruciating labor and relentless beatings. Things like that would fuck up anybody’s outlook on life, and Samuel was no exception.
From what I had been told, it was actually his owner that first had a chance encounter with a vampire. He was turned, then shortly afterwards, he attacked and subsequently turned Samuel. Why? Who knows? Maybe he wanted to hold dominion over his slave forever, or maybe he was just thirsty.
Either way, it’s safe to say this guy was a dick sandwich and a half. He was also a complete dumbass, too. Being a brand new vampire himself, Samuel’s master had no idea what he was doing. I’d heard the act of turning brings out the feral nature in some people. Samuel was the perfect poster child for this. Upon awakening as one of the undead, he completely snapped. He turned on his former master, who was too new to know how to control him. Then, when he was done, he attacked his now former owner’s family. He didn’t stop there, either, slaughtering every living thing on his plantation and the next two over before his rage burned itself out.
Since by that time the Civil War was raging full force, nothing odd was thought of the carnage. After all, when you had an invading army with a scorched-earth policy rampaging about, most people weren’t going to look at a few dozen dead bodies and immediately say, “Hey! It must be vampires.” Samuel was thus able to escape without much notice. If anyone did try to stand in his way, the archives make no mention of it. However, if someone did, it’s a safe bet as to what happened to them.
If you’re thinking that all of this caused him to spend the next century and a half nursing a massive chip on his shoulder, then bingo! Even up to the present day, it was well known in the vampire community that Samuel only accepted minorities into his coven, and even in that he was particular. Don’t get me wrong – I might be a little bit jaded, too, if any of that shit had happened to me. However, it also meant that it wouldn’t be too hard for me, your quintessential dorky-looking white guy, to push his buttons. A two-hundred-year-old vampire in a mindless rage was actually easier to fight than a two-hundred-year-old vampire who was thinking rationally and planning his every step. Fortunately for me, pissing people off was one of my specialties.
“Damn, you people have hard heads,” I said in a condescending manner. Yeah, I felt like a massive dick saying it, but I’d rather be a living dick than a politically correct corpse.
“What the fuck did you say?!” Samuel growled as he rose and once more began stalking me.
“Oh, I’m sorry. Forgot you don’t understand proper English too well.” I increased the mocking in my tone. “How’s this? Yo, nigga! You gots yourself one motherfucking hard head!” Oh yeah, I probably erased about a lifetime’s worth of good karma on that one. But it worked. Samuel came right at me with little more than an inarticulate snarl. If I didn’t time this right, I was going to get a front row seat to watching my head shoved up my own ass.
As he charged me, I reached into my back pocket and pulled out my secret weapon, glad I’d decided to bring it. Considering this was supposed to be a peace conference, I almost hadn’t. Thank goodness for paranoia. As Samuel closed the distance, I kept the fork hidden from his view, waiting for the right time to strike.
Yes, I said fork – not a cross, not a gun, and definitely not the holy hand grenade of Antioch. Trust me on this one. For starters, forget what you know. Crosses by themselves don’t do shit against vampires. If you ever found yourself cornered by vamps and figured you could get out of it by holding two popsicle sticks together, well, you were going to be in for a major disappointment. Sure, maybe you’d get lucky and they’d laugh so hard at your idiocy that you’d be able to slip away, but I wouldn’t count on it. I’m a glass is half full kind of guy, but that’s a stretch even for me.
Anyway, Samuel crossed the distance between us almost faster than I could see. I barely had enough time to brace myself before he hit me in the side of the head with a wild backhand swing, knocking my ass to the floor. I had to admit that under normal circumstances the blow would have probably put me down for the count. But these weren’t normal circumstances, and I wasn’t a normal vampire ... if there even was such a thing.
You see, I was already juiced up from earlier. At the start of the fight, one of Samuel’s goons had come at me first. I had stepped into his punch and sunk my teeth into his arm – managing to suck down a few mouthfuls of blood before he could pry me off.
Ignore the shit you see on your typical late night vampire softcore flick – the kind in which everyone was biting and sucking on everyone else. In reality, when a vamp chomped down on another, bad things happened to the biter. The effect was kind of like what you might expect if you were to drive down to Tijuana and drink your fill from the first water fountain you came across – only amplified a couple dozen times. Forget fighting; most bloodsuckers wouldn’t be strong enough to stand for several hours after drinking another vampire’s blood. But not me.
I’m what the other undead called a Freewill. Apparently, we’re rare ... as in it’s been at least half a millennium since anyone has seen another. Whatever the case, it did seem to come with some perks. For starters, I’m immune to psychic domination, or compulsion as it was called.
Perhaps even cooler than that, though, is what happened when I drank another vampire’s blood. Instead of puking my guts out, I somehow temporarily added their strength to my own. How? Fucked if I knew. All I cared was that it had saved my ass on more than one occasion.
I didn’t know how old the vampire I bit was, but I was easily running at about two-hundred percent of my normal level. Not powerful enough to engage Samuel directly, but strong enough to take blows that would otherwise turn my head concave. Thus I was able to shake his hit off and jump back to my feet. Maybe I was a little wobblier than I would’ve preferred – he hit me pretty damned hard, after all – but standing was definitely better than lying down and letting him go all ape-shit on me.
As he once more came after me, still blinded by rage, I sidestepped and plunged the fork deep into the middle of his back. Samuel was a big guy with heavily muscled arms. Normally that’s a good thing, both for attracting the ladies as well as beating the tar out of flabby shits like me, but it’s a bad thing for being flexible – as in nimble enough to be able to reach around and pull my meager weapon out.
The fork itself didn’t do much. I mean, I’m sure it stung a little. But using a kitchen utensil against a vampire was a lot like using a penknife against a grizzly bear – unless, that is, it happened to be a special kitchen utensil. Fortunately for me, it was. After a second or two, I could smell it. Another few, and I could see it. And I’m definitely sure Samuel felt it.
♦ ♦ ♦
Two weeks earlier, I had been sitting at home, sipping on a pint of refrigerated blood and minding my own business. I was relaxing on a Monday night following a long day of coding. I worked as a video game developer. I did it during my life and still did it during my undeath. I liked my job and all, but there was a small part of my mind that liked to remind me that I’m a vampire. Not only that, but I’m a legendary type of vampire who was also the head of his own fucking coven ... and yet I was still a goddamned wage slave.
I had figured that once I took over Village Coven, it was going to be one big party after another, with maybe an orgy or two in between. But noooo. Sally, my so-called partner, kept a tight rein on the coven’s bank books. I was lucky to score cab fare from her, much less live the life of avaricious abandon I so craved. But we’ll get back to her in a moment, as she definitely had a hand in the situation going on with Samuel.
So there I was unwinding when Tom came in the door. Both of my roommates, Tom and Ed, were human. Kind of made us a less attractive, but significantly more fucked-up version of Three’s Company. Anyway, he had spent the weekend at his parents’ home in New Jersey (also home to his slightly underage hottie of a sister, which has really nothing to do with the present situation. I just like to mention it). Afterward, he’d gone straight to his job in Manhattan, so I had no idea he’d had anything planned for me. If I had, I probably would have been elsewhere.
“I’ve got something new we can try,” he excitedly said after tossing his sports jacket into the closet. I didn’t even need to ask what he meant by that. I’d been turned into a vampire some six months prior, and ever since then my roommates had made it their mission in life to chart my powers and weaknesses. It was mostly the weaknesses they seemed to focus on, and thus, in addition to friends, I had to add torturers to the mental description I kept for both of them. Barely a week went by in which they didn’t come up with some new scheme that involved stabbing, burning, or crushing me. My pain had become their hobby.
Yeah, they both really needed to get laid.
“What now?” I asked in a bored tone, hoping it might dissuade him.
“This.” He pulled an old fork out of his pocket.
“Let me guess, you misunderstood my previous instructions and are now going to fork yourself?”
“Keep trying, Bill,” he dryly remarked. “In another century or two, you might grow a sense of humor that’s actually funny. For your information, this here is not just a fork. It’s silverware ... you know, as in silver.”
“So? You guys already tried silver. It didn’t do jack-shit.”
“Yeah, I know. But forget about that. That shitty letter opener was only silver plated. I didn’t really think it would work anyway.”
“And yet, it didn’t stop you from stabbing me with it ... repeatedly.”
“Sorry. All in the name of science,” he continued. “But this is different, trust me. This weekend, my mom had some friends over and she pulled out the good stuff. She inherited it from her grandmother. This is the real deal here. Pure, solid, you-could-melt-it-down-and-shoot-werewolves-with-it silver.”
“So let me get this straight: you stole your mom’s prized silverware?”
“Borrowed is more like it,” he replied. “Besides, I don’t see anything wrong with taking a little advance on my inheritance ... especially in the name of research.”
“You know there’s probably a special room in Hell reserved just for you, right?”
“As long as it has air conditioning, then I’m cool with it. Now hold still. This might sting a bit.”
I don’t know why I let him. Maybe I was getting used to it, or maybe I was just tired from the day’s work. Vampires and normal work hours didn’t mesh too well under the best of circumstances. More than likely, though, I just knew he’d get me eventually. Even if I flat out told him “No!” now, he’d probably wait and stab me in the neck the second I stopped paying attention. Thus, whatever the insane reason, I held still as he jammed the damn thing into me.
“Well?” he asked, the fork sticking out the back of my hand. Small drops of blood started welling up around the tines.
“Well, it fucking hurts. Pull it out!”
“Give it a sec.”
“Now ... OW!” I cried as first smoke and then sparks started shooting out of the small puncture wounds.
“Holy shit, it worked! I knew it!” he exclaimed, all while watching the skin of my hand start to char and turn black.
In response, I glared and bared my fangs.
After a moment or two, he finally got the hint. “Oh, sorry,” he said with a sheepish smile before finally yanking the accursed cutlery out.
Goddamn, that was painful. The bleeding and burning were bad enough, but it also felt like there was a small legion of coal miners under the skin of my hand, hacking away with dull pickaxes. All in all, a dandy load of fun.
♦ ♦ ♦
What had happened to me then was repeating itself within Samuel, albeit in a slightly more central location. As much as I had wanted to punch out Tom’s lights at the time, I had to grudgingly admit that this one might be a keeper. Further (reluctant) testing had shown two other interesting side effects.
For starters, silver was safe to the touch for me. I could hold and even eat with it. Yeah, that eating part took some convincing by Tom, but he’s nothing if not persistent. Whatever its effect, it apparently only happened when in contact with vampire blood – kind of like dropping a magnesium flare into a pool of water.
Even better, albeit worse for me at the time, was that something in the silver retarded my enhanced healing. Instead of a few minutes, it took all night for my hand to get back to normal. So it stood to reason that even if Samuel managed to pry loose the fork, which was rapidly turning his back into something akin to a roman candle, it was going to be a while before he felt good about it.
Blinded by both rage and pain, Samuel more or less lost it. He screamed inarticulately and began spinning around, attempting to get at the source of his torment as his back continued to be engulfed in flames. He plowed into and through another wall, but the fork was stuck fast.
This was my chance, and I wasn’t about to let it go. I picked up another plank of wood from the rubble, then snapped it in half over my knee, making sure one of the pieces ended in a nice, sharp point. It would make a dandy makeshift stake.
“Form Blazing Sword, motherfucker!” I shouted as I charged to finish him off. Yeah, I needed to work on my one-liners. Apparently, I still had to work on not being a cocky dickhead either.
Aflame or not, my dorky catchphrase managed to catch Samuel’s attention. As I closed in, stake held high, he caught me on the chin with an uppercut that sent me flying.
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