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“Dominic, are you seriously going to order that shit?”
“Fuck you, you scrawny little bitch. At least my sister makes nice warm meals for you when you come home from work. Patti won’t even microwave me a TV dinner.”
Dominic was twice my size and easily could have broken me in half, but he let me get away with shit that no one else could say to him. “Look at you. Who the hell eats a twelve-inch sub all by himself? What are you 300 pounds? No wonder Patti won’t have sex with you, if you get on top of her you’ll kill her. If she gets on top of you, she’d be banging her head against the ceiling.”
“You’re up,” said Dominic. “Shut your fucking face and bowl.”
It was only our close bond that enabled me to be such a merciless ballbreaker. And on our bowling nights at the lanes on Tarrytown Road in White Plains, he was a captive audience. We participated in a league there with some of his buddies from the NYPD and every week our team would witness Dominic’s gluttony when he ordered from the sports bar attached to the bowling alley. His sub would be loaded with ham, provolone, salami, turkey, lettuce, tomatoes, oil, vinegar, and whatever else they could get their hands on in the kitchen. By the time they finished with his sandwich, not only was it twelve inches long, the fucking thing was twelve inches thick. On top of that, he would order two liters of beer so the food chunks could float around his guts like dead rats in a sewer.
One night Dominic’s order came in while he was taking his turn bowling. He was completely focused on the lanes because he was working on a 200 game. Unable to resist, I took the waitress who brought in his sandwich aside and paid for it without him noticing. I then hid it underneath my jacket. Our other two teammates and the opposing team played along. They laughed quietly as Dominic came back to his seat, looking towards the sports bar, wondering where his sandwich was.
On his next turn when he was again in deep concentration aiming for another strike, all of us feasted on Dominic’s sandwich, leaving him with maybe three inches of the former foot-long monstrosity. At the lane, Dominic threw a particularly impressive hook to get his sixth strike of the game. He strutted proudly on the way back to his seat but noticed there was still no sign of his sandwich. Our other two teammates and I couldn’t hold back any longer. I presented him with the mangled remains of his sub.
“Hey Dom, your sandwich is here.”
He lunged at me but I quickly leapt out of his reach. “Come here, I’ll kill you!”
“You see, you fat bastard? If you weren’t so overweight you could have caught me,” I said from a safe distance.
“You can’t stay away forever,” said Dominic, pointing his finger at me. “When it’s your turn to bowl, I’m gonna kick your ass.”
Dominic was a good-natured guy, though. He cooled off quickly after seeing his cop buddies double over in laughter. He couldn’t help but shake his head and join them.
Later after he reordered the same glop, I took a seat beside him and watched him gobble it down. “Pretty good sandwich, ain’t it?”
Dominic glared at me, chewing slowly before swallowing. “You’re a prick, you know that?”
#
Dominic and his esposa Patricia, met while he was on duty at a car show at the Coliseum. She was tall, attractive and blonde, just the way he liked them. Patricia Giuliana Vargas Ledesma was from Argentina. And for some reason, she would get extremely offended whenever someone would pronounce her name Patrisha. She would correct you, “se pronuncia Pa-tree-see-ah,”. It didn’t matter anyway, we called her Patti.
The first few years of their marriage went pretty well and often they would double-date with me and Stefanie. When their twin daughters, Aida and Penny, were born we did more of the family type stuff like barbecues, weekend trips and even vacations together.
But Dominic’s first love was police work, and when the NYPD began demanding more of his time, his marriage to Patti became increasingly antagonistic. The more time he spent away from her at work, the more incensed she would become. Eventually that resentment spilled over towards the rest of the family. Whenever we defended his work ethic she would say that we were taking sides against her.
Once she began to feel isolated from the rest of us, she ultimately morphed into a nasty, sour battle-ax and by the sixth year of their marriage, they could barely stand the sight each other. Somehow they managed to drag things out another eleven years before finally throwing in the towel with a quickie divorce.
Dominic let her have whatever she wanted. “Just get her the fuck out of my life!” Oddly enough, when he talks about her today, he insists on how much he misses and is still in love with her. Hey, don’t ask me.
After the divorce Dominic moved into a one-bedroom apartment in Co-op City, where he spent nights staring out the window at the passing cars on the Hutchinson River Parkway. The night after I asked Travis and Donny about Dr. Gunder, I snooped through the files in Dominic’s apartment while he gazed at the traffic outside with a can of Schlitz. By that time, I had mastered the art of quiet, unseen presence with someone else in the room. It’s unkind to make someone you care about hear things that go bump in the night. Without even rustling a sheet of paper, I looked through Dominic’s desk for anything else that could shed a light on his unsanctioned investigation. I was especially appreciative that his window was open and the cars on the parkway were noisy enough to cover any sounds coming from the desk.
Or so I thought.
A little bell from Dominic’s computer broke the silence. It was an e-mail from tg48. Soft as the bell was, he heard it and walked over to his desk. With no mercy to the tiny office chair whose wheels were about to snap off, Dominic planted his size 46 caboose and opened the message.
“We have still not resolved the critical effect that the MV-12 Detection Serum has on the human condition. Until then, I cannot accept your offer to volunteer as a test subject. I will remain the only test subject for now. The serum contains several known carcinogens and as a doctor I cannot in good conscience test it on a healthy human being.”
Healthy? Obviously this person didn’t know Dominic too well, even though it was apparent this was not their first communication.
“The serum has shown great promise, however. It has succeeded in enabling me to trace one of the infected by penetrating through his projected facade. This was confirmed in the daylight when we found the domain where he had retired into his casket. We exposed the room by opening the curtains and blinds that were covering his windows. When we pried open his casket, his torso almost immediately went into flames. If it were not for the colleague that I had working with me seeing the same thing, I might have questioned my own sanity as so many others have already. Instead, we will now be able to soon understand what happened to my son and your brother-in-law. To this day, these types of deaths are still being foolishly described as spontaneous combustion. But now, for the first time, I was able to trace and identify one of these beings—a creature that in the past had been written off as legend or superstition instead of reality—one that grows more frightening with everything I learn. This is a danger that cannot be ignored. The nature of this infected species is predatory, and humanity is their prey.
I thank you for your support and your assistance. I will continue to inform you of any further developments. Teresa Gunder”
Holy shit!
No wonder this woman shook Travis like no one else could. She is the biggest danger our kind has ever faced—a real life Von Helsing! But what was MV12? Obviously it was dangerous to humans too, so why was Dominic volunteering to put that shit in him? And how did these two become pen pals? Self-loathing vampire or not, I still have the self-preservation drive that keeps us from ever wanting to face death—again. Knowing how bad it was the first time is incentive enough—and that’s not even taking into account that my unholy existence destines me to eternal flames.
I think I’ll stay here.
When Dominic took his beer buzz to bed, it allowed me to log on to his account and read his e-mail history with tg48. It went back almost two years when she saw that Dominic had taken an interest in her son’s case. She began her correspondence anonymously before identifying herself as Ronnie’s mother five months later, eventually trusting him enough to share details about her research.
The doctor had travelled as far as Central Europe, where she listened to local stories about mysterious deaths similar to her son’s. Like here in the States, most of the stories had already been laughed off by the local authorities, who refused to give her access and permission to study these cases further.
In Romania, the doctor met an 86-year old woman whose husband’s death in the 1930’s had some parallels to Ronnie Gunder’s five decades later. The woman, who was totally devoted to her husband, was never able to accept his death and she remained a widow ever since, singing an old Romanian love ballad to his ashes at her bedside.
Ashes!
The old woman resisted at first but Dr. Gunder worked hard to convince her that giving access to just a trace of those ashes would allow her to compare them to her son’s and use what she learns to prevent similar deaths in the future. It would bring something positive from the losses that they suffered. From there, with her scientific background, medical knowledge, and whatever-the-fuck lives inside the brains of these analytical types, the doctor was able to see patterns and similarities surrounding many other unexplained deaths throughout Europe, and North and South America.
Inside Dominic’s desk I also found a VHS tape, which I took home with me. It was labelled “DR. GUNDER 8/20/90”. Once I got home, I slipped it in my VCR and sat down with a bag of Lay’s sour cream and onion chips and a can of Dos Equis (maybe I’m the most interesting undead man in the world). The tape was of some local access cable interview out of Syracuse University, where her son attended. The interview subject was Dr. Gunder. She had granted time to some smug college student at the university studio.
The doctor was in her early fifties but the lines of pain on her face made her seem older. Still, she was doable, like Kenny Neglia used to like to say. I’m sure the doctor detected the skinny, bespectacled interviewer’s skepticism but she was probably used to that. She spoke patiently with the young man, understanding how difficult it was for a normal person to wrap his mind around the outrageous claims she was making. But to the interviewer’s credit, he handled the conversation with respect to the surviving mother of one of his fellow students. He gave her free reign. The doctor went on to describe how the unexplained deaths she had researched around the world were raising whispers of the supernatural.
In those days there was, what I like to call, decorum. In deference to the suffering mother, the tape was probably never shown outside of the local cable access channel—until now. Now it’s all over the Internet. Anyone who’d seen that interview back then probably took it as the ramblings of a broken woman who had lost her child. Me, I was shocked at how much she was actually able to learn.
“The reason they have these capabilities that for so many centuries were dismissed as folklore is because they are literally not from this world,” said Dr. Gunder.
“What do you mean?” asked the interviewer.
“In my visit to Central Europe, I had found fossilized organisms on a meteorite that matched some of the remains found at the scene of my son’s death.”
The student tried to word his question carefully to not come across as if he was mocking the doctor. “Are you saying that not only do vampires exist, but that they are also actually an alien life form?”
The doctor forced a miniscule smile. “The viral organisms located at the site were brought there by that meteorite. It was not an organism that came from this earth. I have even found remains of this organism in the ashes of those infected. And let me make this clear, no organisms associated humans can leave remains. You can find elemental compositions in human ashes but no organisms. The remains of this organism were not human. And yes, I have traced the source of the mysterious deaths and the symptoms described by the local town residents to that meteorite. It is a virus that kills and reanimates its host as a being that feeds on the blood of its own species. Does that sound familiar to you?” The interviewer respectfully nodded. “And even though the host is technically no longer alive, by feeding off other human blood, it is able to continue hosting the micro-organism that dwells inside of him.”
The student remained respectful, although I sensed a smirk being repressed. “Do the hosts have any recollection of who they are or what happened to them?”
“It’s very interesting that you ask that,” replied the doctor. “I have found that there were humans that had a genetic resistance towards complete transformation. There has been a small amount of cases where victims retained a consciousness of who they were when they were alive, therefore carrying the characteristics, memories, intelligence and emotions that they’ve always had. Those are the ones that suffer the real horror, the horror of losing everything and everyone that they’ve ever loved.”
“What about the others?” the student asked.
“Their consciousness stems from the organism within. They have the capability to interact with society, but they are strictly predatory with no consciousness of the life the host had before.”
Again the student wanted to carefully select his next words. “Just so we can be clear, what you’re stating is that you can scientifically prove the existence of vampires.”
“No, that is not what I am stating,” replied the doctor.
“Then what is it that you are stating?”
“I am stating that I already have.”