Universal Monsters Chapter XV
We had to walk around Alabama. The entire damn thing was on fire. Fire to the skies, and, hell, maybe into the heavens and maybe into Heaven proper. Fire as high as we could see. And something swam in the flames. Brimstone Whales or Ember Sharks. Something. They were only silhouettes, really. We couldn’t get to close enough to make much out. Hair started burning ten or fifteen feet away from the state line and there was nothing to breathe but heat and fear and rage.
Jackson tried to fish into the fire, just to see what he could get and because we were in no particular hurry and because, we suppose, Jackson liked to fish. But even when he spent half a day making a line out of the Kevlar he found on the ashes of a city police a few days earlier, the thing dissolved a good three feet in front of the flames. And we didn’t say it, but we all thought of Fraction. And how he probably would have just walked right into the damn thing, he would have stood barefoot on streets of conflagration, with flickering tongues of flame lapping at him and he would have walked out with a demon squid in his teeth. Food that cooks itself. We thought of how Fraction would have laughed and about how demon squid would probably still be chewy.
We took other things from what little was left of the body of that police. A flashlight and a service revolver with one bullet in the chamber. We talked about how well the flashlight was made to survive whatever turned its owner to dust and about how whatever took down the lawman was probably still out there carrying five of his bullets. It was the first time any of us ever liked a police and we all agreed that it probably helped that we didn’t know him.
This was back when Alabama wasn’t even on the horizon, when we met the vampires for the first time and lost seven men. Maybe even good men. Surely we knew their names once but bodies stack like we suck at Tetris and we move on like we’re a dot org because it’s all we can do. Space told us about a book where death was the only thing that granted a man a name and we all liked the story and we nodded and laughed but it didn’t apply to us. We had our great war now. Apathy borne of fortune was about the last thing we needed to worry about. We were not Jack’s broken heart. We got rid of those things ages ago.
These vampires, the first ones, walked. They wore sunglasses at night and no shirts and when we cut them they didn’t bleed and that bothered us.
When we first saw them we thought they were maybe a gang and, like us, they had survived through the cunning use of hiding behind folk. They were hard men, we could see that, and they were roughly the color of the ash that hangs off a cigarette you’ve forgotten about and we greeted them cautiously outside of Sarasota. We knew we couldn’t trust anyone but we knew also that we couldn’t afford to ignore any potential allies. We knew that the days of men hating men were over. Space was the cleverest person in the state as far as any of us could see and as we got closer to the grey men we told him to suss out their intentions and alert us if he thought they meant us harm.
Someone reached out his hand to shake and the vampire started eating him and Space tugged on his ear like he was signalling to his children watching at home and we thought, “Yeah. Picked up on that one.”
They didn’t know karate which was frankly disappointing. They were strong, stronger than most of us but not stronger than all of us and when they growled we growled. And with our own blood staining our teeth we smiled.
And most of us, we were glad Armageddon came on that Tuesday. We never knew how boredom got invented but we knew, then, for-sure how it died.
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