Universal Monsters Chapter XVI
Ever stood in the kind of rain you can’t see through? Sure you have. It’s also the kind of rain you can’t hear through. It’s loud and thick and everywhere at once. It piles up in your eyes like you’re crying and it ruins your phone. Probably you’ve kissed in that kind of rain and maybe danced and laughed. This would have been before that Tuesday when you still believed in dancing and love and kissing. It was like that only what it was raining was blood and meat. Crimson tears. It wasn’t all our blood but a lot of it was and either way it was blood. And the noise we couldn’t hear through was us. We were screaming.
Shit jumped off like we couldn’t understand. We met the vampires on the road and, basically, it was like, “Hello.” Beat. “Oh, you’re eating us, then. Okay.”
Jack Quietly was a bull through and through and still. He stepped to the bastards and lost his other arm almost immediately. Jack screamed, “Are you fucking kidding me!?!” to no one in particular while the rest of us made Monty Python jokes and the vamp who ripped the arm out of its socket worked the thing like corn on the cob. We would swear at one point it salted the thing.
Brinkmire played dead and it worked. We pretty much figured it didn’t fool anyone but that the vamps just didn’t want to eat something that sad. A weeping hamburger.
Frank, of course, was much too ugly to eat. One of the blood suckers grabbed him and just kind of stared at him the way maybe your four year old stares at green beans and, after a while he pushed Frank away with an, “I just can’t.”
It saved his life but Frank has been pretty down about it ever since.
We lost seven men to the vampires and it could have been everyone but Frank if Space weren’t there. He watched them under the half moon and he sorted out that the vamps had eyes that see better in darkness than light. Shine a a dead police’s LED right in their face, he figured, it’d be like sparking a road flair next to someone wearing night vision goggles. It was a sound enough theory. They’d be blind.
Space took the unlikely weapon off his belt and shot it right into the face of the toothy bastard that was gnawing on Lucian’s leg while Lucian gnawed on his. And in a turn none of us expected the half-breed demon’s head exploded and the world-entire smelled like sulfur we thought.
All of us, convicts, inmates and demons alike, we all stopped what we were doing and in time like we practiced it we said, “What the fuck?” Some of us spoke with our mouths full.
Space looked down at the torch and it only took him about moment to realize he had sunlight in his hands. He had sunlight in a tube.
“It’s UV,” he said. “It’s a daylight saber.” And he wielded it like he’d seen Empire thirty-six times. Which, of course, he had.
He cut them all down in a heartbeat and and he stood inside a circle of smoke and death and he smiled and said, “I’ll never walk around a vampire again.”
And we all agreed it was time to stop by the Wal-Mart.
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