CHAPTER 14
On Friday night, feeling more like a failure than ever, Reginald called Maurice and informed him that he was ready to begin learning to hunt. Maurice asked if he’d tried on Thursday as he’d suggested, and Reginald, unable to repeat his humiliating defeat at the hands of a jogger and a senior citizen to his vampire mentor, said he hadn’t. Maurice sounded disappointed that Reginald hadn’t even tried, but told him that the good news was that he could try tonight.
“With you. Of course.”
“No,” said Maurice. “Not with me.”
Reginald thought he must have heard incorrectly.
“What do you mean, ‘Not with me?’”
“I have to go out of town,” Maurice told him.
“Wait. You’re not coming over here at all?”
“I’m already on my way out of town. I’ll be back Sunday.”
Reginald couldn’t believe what he was hearing. How could Maurice abandon him?
“Sunday? Are you kidding?”
“You’ll be fine. Any vampire can feed. It’s in your blood… no pun intended.”
Reginald considered telling Maurice about last night’s failure after all, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. It was too humiliating. Besides, if Maurice was really already on his way out of town, then there was nothing he could do anyway. Reginald’s best bet was to act indignant. It wouldn’t change anything, but at least it’d make him feel better.
“How can you abandon your prodigy on the eve of his inaugural feeding? I might die of starvation while you’re off galavanting!”
When he replied, Maurice’s tone was amused and not at all perturbed, but there was a seriousness in his voice that indicated that what he said was final… possibly even grave.
“This is an errand I can’t refuse,” he said. “Vampire Nation stuff. I’ll tell you all about it when I get back. But in the meantime, you’ll be fine. Even if you can’t feed, you’ll live. You may not want to live at that point, but you will.” And he laughed, because he clearly thought this was a situation that would never come to pass. But after last night, Reginald thought it was a distinct possibility.
He begged for another minute or two and then hung up, thoroughly dispirited.
So it was off to the park again, then. How fun.
Before leaving, Reginald ran through his attack options in his head to find the scenario with the greatest likelihood of success. He’d need to wait for someone who was walking, not running. He’d need to approach with stealth, closing as much of the distance as he could before commencing the attack. It was a simple plan.
He planned in this way for six hours. Forming the plan took two minutes of that six hours, and the rest of the time was spent playing sudoku, which had gotten much easier in the past week. He completed three books, then spent some time imagining his inevitable failure. Then he got in the car and drove.
By the time he reached the waterfront, it was four-thirty — the time when the people who are up late give way to the people who are up early. Traffic on the path was very light.
It was a half hour before he saw his first group of people, and a while after that before he saw any singles. While he was waiting, sitting on his dark and lonely bench and wishing stupid Maurice hadn’t taken his stupid self off on some stupid errand, he checked his cell phone. Sunrise was at 6:46. By the time he saw his victim, it was nearly five-fifteen.
The victim in question was a young man walking alone. He was texting. Like the woman last night, he had a pair of headphones in his ears. He wasn’t paying any attention to the world around him.
Trotting up slowly, quietly, afraid to so much as breathe, Reginald came up behind the kid. With another night of hunger under his belt, he found that he could actually smell the young man’s blood. It made his head spin. Maurice had been right. He would know what to do. He felt his fangs descend. The fangs seemed to have a mind of their own, and he could feel them pulling him toward living flesh. He knew, on some level, how the blood would taste. The thought didn’t repulse him. It made him hungry. Only, it was more than hunger. It was a base, physiological need. The thought of feeding on the kid made his face burn. It was almost arousing.
His victim was wearing a brown hoodie, slung casually back. He was wearing a strappy undershirt underneath. His neck was tantalizingly exposed. Reginald got close enough to see the veins and arteries under his tan skin, throbbing and pulsing. Reginald’s tongue licked his fangs, which didn’t feel at all odd in his mouth. His breath became shallow, excited. He opened his mouth. Then he grabbed the kid with one hand on a shoulder and the other on the side of his head. Quickly, he leaned forward as if he were about to eat a watermelon.
The kid snapped away just as Reginald was about to pierce his skin, snatching the enticing neck away. He turned and stared hard into Reginald’s eyes. Reginald was too shocked (and feeling the vampire equivalent of blue balls) to think of glamouring him. He just stood with his hands still in watermelon-holding position, his mouth open and his fangs out.
“What the fuck, homes?” said the kid. Then something changed in his face and he stared more closely at Reginald, who didn’t know what to do and had frozen in place like a waxwork. His eyes were darting from side to side, waiting for someone to rescue him.
The kid said, “Are you a fucking vampire?”
Reginald nodded, slowly.
“I know you weren’t about to drink my blood, motherfucker,” he said, his face becoming angry.
Reginald decided to go for broke. He peeled his lips back and hissed. “I could break your neck before you knew what hit you. Make it easy on yourself and come back over here, and I’ll let you live.”
The kid shook his head. “I don’t think so. The only thing you could break the neck of would be a bucket of fried chicken. Aren’t you pretty fat for a vampire?”
“You don’t know who you’re messing with,” said Reginald. “I own the night!”
“Dude, you don’t own shit. You should own a treadmill.” Then he laughed.
Reginald couldn’t believe this. Even as a vampire, he was being mocked. He decided that if he concentrated all of his speed into one small motion, he could impress and scare the kid, to show him who was boss.
He pistoned his hand toward the kid’s arm. The kid stepped back and slapped it away.
“Motherfucker! Get your hands off me! Fat faggot motherfucker trying to suck my blood. Knew I shouldn’t have come out here tonight. Nothing but fat faggot vampires in the parks these days.”
Reginald reached again, desperately hungry. He didn’t have the energy or the time to try and find someone else, and he couldn’t make it through another night. “Get over here,” he said.
“Fuck off!”
“Come on. I’ll be quick.”
“Motherfucker, you will keep your hands the fuck off me!”
Reginald reached into his pocket and pulled out his wallet. “Tell you what. I’ll pay you. I’ve got fifty bucks in here. Like, two minutes tops.”
“The fuck is wrong with you, you fat fucking faggot?” said the kid, knocking Reginald’s wallet out of his hand. “What kind of a vampire are you, paying people to let you bite them?”
“A hundred, then,” said Reginald, stooping to pick up his wallet. “I only have the fifty, though, so you’ll need to come with me to an ATM.”
Then everything went black as the kid hit him, hard, across the chin.
He had a dream that he starved to death. He desiccated like a raisin and Maurice found him curled up in his house and said, “I knew I made a mistake.” Then things in the dream changed and he was in hell, a vampire hell, with vampires everywhere, their legs and arms and hair on fire, forever in pain and forever burning but unable to die…
… and then his eyes opened and there was nothing but pain across his face as a beam of sunlight lanced him like a sword. He rolled away and it stopped, but a second later there was another pain in his hand, then on his face again. It was disorienting.
He fought the pain and got to his hands and knees and looked around. He was maybe ten feet off the path, more or less hidden from early-morning walkers by three trash cans marked for the disposal of aluminum, glass, and refuse. The sun was rising in the east, across the river, and he was mostly shadowed by a huge, overhanging tree. Sunlight was peeking through the shifting holes in the leaves, and each time one of the beams touched him, it was like being seared by a brand.
He scrambled back, deeper into the shadows.
As the sun began to rise, Reginald ducked back into the shadows under the tree. He figured he could spend the day on his usual bench near the trunk of a second, larger tree, but then he realized that he felt very hot despite the fact that his skin had already healed from the singeing.
He opened the buttons on his shirt. He rolled up his pantlegs and rolled down his socks. Then he took off the shoes and socks. If he’d had a razor, he would have shaved his head. Eventually, fighting embarrassment, he stripped off his shirt. His gut looked enormous and pasty in the outside air. But none of it helped, and sweat began to bead on his skin and pool in his belly button. It ran down his back and onto the bench, into his pants and underwear. His hair became a heavy, sloppy mess.
It was the sun.
Even though the shade was filtering out direct light, indirect light was bouncing off of every surface he could see. And really, that was just the visible spectrum. All of the other wavelengths of solar radiation were moving right through the leaves — right through the bark of the tree — and baking him.
As if to confirm this, his exposed white belly began to turn red before his eyes. He lifted one of the large folds of skin and found his flesh white underneath. He held the flap up and watched as the newly exposed skin began to turn red, too.
He had to get out of here. But to where?
The bridge.
There. Not far away, but far enough away to be terrifying.
As if playing a deadly serious game of “the floor is made of lava,” Reginald slid off the bench and made his way across the grass, staying in the rapidly diminishing islands of shadow, until he reached the underside of the bridge over the river. He climbed up underneath it like a troll.
With several feet of concrete and rebar between him and the sun, Reginald began to cool down. He pulled his phone from his pocket. It was just after seven AM, and about fifty-nine degrees. He assessed his own temperature. Yes, that felt about right. He’d be safe here.
With no way to get home and nobody to call, Reginald settled in to spend the day under the bridge. There was one other person in the crook of the bridge with him — a homeless man who seemed very concerned that Reginald would try to steal his blanket. Reginald showed the man his fangs and the man took his blanket and ran. It was only after he’d left that Reginald realized he could have fed on the man, at which point Reginald told himself, yet again, that he was the worst, fattest, biggest failure of a vampire ever.
As the sun rose, he tried to sleep. It wasn’t easy. There was no truly level surface up high under the bridge, and every time he tried to sleep, he found himself starting to roll down the incline and toward the jogging path. So he sat up and leaned against a stanchion, pulled out his phone, and watched YouTube videos until the battery had all but died. He decided to save a few minutes of usage just in case. Maybe he could get someone to deliver a pizza to a man under the bridge. You never knew.
A few hours later, several hot dog vendors set up within his line of sight. It was like torture. He didn’t need hot dogs any more than he needed the pizza he’d ordered a few nights ago, but the memory of human hunger mingled with his blood hunger drove the sensation up to a fever pitch. He tried several times to get people on the jogging path to get him a hot dog, yelling at them from up under the supports, but each time he tried, the person he’d been trying to solicit either yelled obscenities at him or took off running.
By the time the sun set on Saturday, his hunger had become something physical. His skin, on his hands, was beginning to look dried and wrinkly. His stomach didn’t rumble, but somehow his blood did. He could feel it in every part of his body, running outward from his core in long, ropy tendrils of desperation. With each heartbeat, need left his heart and screamed out in search of sustenance, and with each beat, blood returned to his heart empty-handed and sad. He could feel his blood’s need in every cell of his body. What had Maurice said? It was like a limb he didn’t know he had.
Yes, it felt like that.
Having been outrun by a woman, caned by an old man, and beaten up by a teenager, Reginald decided to lower his expectations. He wasn’t ready for the big leagues. He had to go down past the farm leagues, past the minors, past little league. He needed the vampire hunting equivalent of preschool tee-ball.
So, as the sun was setting, he used the last of his phone’s battery to do an internet search. After a few minutes of dead ends, he found a church that offered daycare for parents who worked late — later than most daycares even on weekends, for later-than-normal parents.
This one would keep your kids until ten if necessary.
Past sunset.