Bones and Bagger (Waldlust Series Book 1) (2 page)

Thanks Dad.  

So I took a bite of that cursed apple.  Well, heart to be specific, but this is the last metaphor I’m going to explain.  You’re on your own for the rest. The other two who also partook, those are the vampires I can’t sense.  They smell the same to me as they do to you.

Someone once interviewed a fictional vampire.  I know you want to get back to the curb outside the commissary, but I also know you have a few questions rolling around in your mind.  You can’t ask them, but I can.  So I’ll take a moment and interview myself.

Here goes.

Chapter 3

Self, I have a few questions for me:

1.                 
   After that complete jackass Sparky—I love it when I get to write the questions—shoved the bloody piece of heart into your mouth, how long before you knew something was wrong? 
   

Answer: Immediately.  I mean, bloody piece of human heart, kind-of dead Roman soldier, and my mouth; combining those words in the same equation and what do you get on the other side of the equals sign?  The word wrong.

If my question to myself refers to how soon I knew I would become something different.  The answer remains the same.  Immediately. 

After Sparky used the knife to get the heart out of the dying Roman, the dude sat up and spoke to us.  First, he gave us his thanks.  In Latin. Everyone who was anyone spoke Latin in those days.  Also, both my dad and I were Roman citizens.  I’ll tell you how we ended up on the pointy side of a Roman legion later. 

So this Roman said thanks to the three of us (Sparcius, Gaius—that’s me, and Rolf, whose parents had no imagination when it came to Roman names). You read correctly, this guy without a heart actually said thanks.  A definite hint my day had grown weird. So the Roman went on about finally getting rest after thousands of years.  That pretty much freaked the three of us out—even with the clanging of battle only a few meters away. 

Well Rolf’s name may have been as light as his brain, but his sword arm was strong enough.  One swing and Talky Roman’s head bounced off a nearby tree and landed face up in the grass. You’d think that’d put an end to the poor creature’s gratitude.  Would mine. Not so fast.  He spit out a mouthful of blood and kept at it. 

A talking head, and I don’t mean a member of the rock band.  So Balus—yes, he did introduce himself—gave us the 411 regarding what eating his heart meant.  Well, what it meant to us, because the three of us—four, if you count one of the earliest organ donors in medical history—understood the whole heart-out-of-body thing meant Balus’s day could have gone better for him. 

Balus told us the stark facts, and it was like when you drink a glass of milk and feel fine up to the point someone tells you it’s sour.  First came that acidic gurgling in my stomach.  And then I didn’t know which end, my mouth or my butt cheeks, would cut loose first. Seems we’d become some kind of semi-immortal predators.  Lucky us.

Had we not cleaned our metaphorical plates and left even a sliver of Balus’s heart in place, our headless buddy could have regrown his ticker, done the same for his head, and then kind of mentored us into our new situation.  But since that idiot Sparky pulled every heart cell out of Balus’s body, the school of hard knocks presented each of us a full-ride scholarship.  Double-lucky us.

So we listened to the basics because time for old Balus was short; more than five minutes less than ten, as it turned out.  Seems vampire regeneration results in perfect cellular structure, so though cutting out a heart kills a vampire, it takes time for those cells to surrender.  I was still hovering on the thin precipice of puking when Rolf simultaneously hurled and floated a long, loud fart.  I like to think that bad air is what finally put an end to Balus.  But that may just be the romantic in me. 

Rolf accused Balus of lying, but think about the situation.  We eat the heart out of guy and he thanks us afterward.  We then chop off his head and he gives us his life story and tells us we’re to become semi-immortals.  Remember how I implied Rolf’s IQ was just north of room temperature? I mean, can you think of a better time to suspend disbelief? Besides, Rolf didn’t speak much Latin and I’d stopped translating after a couple of sentences.  Too hard to move my lips. Sparky had that uh-oh look and kept his mouth shut.  Dad would have been amazed. So when did I know something was wrong?  Immediately.  Wouldn’t you have?

1.                
   Do you like being a vampire?
   

At first, no.  Later yes.  Since then, I run hot and cold on the idea.

Here’s one all inquiring vampirephiles want to know.

1.                
   Do you feed on people? 
   

The honest answer is yes.  We need blood to survive.  Perhaps that makes our condition a disease.  Our bodies manufacture blood like any other human.  It pains me to disappoint your preconceptions, but we’re definitely not the undead of movies.  I mean, if we weren’t human, why would we need blood to sustain our—I’m going to put this in capital letters—LIVES. 

Undead. Lives.  Notice the mutual exclusivity of the words? Kind of like giant shrimp. I’ll admit human blood provides the greatest nourishment. It gives us the kind of kick Wonder Bread always promised.  It can be high in cholesterol, though.  That’s a drawback.

Warning: embarrassing secret spoiler.  Here’s the thing. I like human blood about as much as you like raw calf’s liver.  I can survive on animal blood for quite a while, but eventually I require the real thing.  It’s best not to hang out with me at those times.

1.                
   Are there any other effective methods for destroying vampires? 
   

Thought I’d sneak that one in on me, did I?  Like I’d really answer
that
one.  Next.

1.                
   Have you always been so roguishly handsome?  Yes.
   

One more I’m sure all the babes out there are wondering:

1.                
   Are you currently in a serious relationship? 
   

No.  But I was married one time.  It’s the reason you’ll never hear or read me use a curse word.  Nellie told me those words weren’t spoken by the better class of people.  I decided I wouldn’t use them either.  It’s my monument to her.

I let myself grow old with Nellie because I wanted to experience our great romance in every phase of life.  Don’t grab for your box of tissues because it wasn’t as noble as it sounds.  I can regenerate my youth.

I considered feeding my heart to her in the final months but more than a million reasons existed that would make such an action the ultimate in selfish moves.  Seven decades with Nellie and each day felt like the first.  As she faded, I became frantic.  I’m sure you understand. My centuries of life experience proved worse than worthless because I knew I couldn’t help her.

Sparky feared I’d lost my mind when Nellie went—he said later he thought I’d do something stupid enough to raise the attention of The Seven.  I didn’t, though I admit to slipping into an emotional coma for about a century after we buried her.  So no, I’m not in a serious relationship. 

Nellie was my one, another could never compare with her or dim my love for her.  I will do nothing to cheapen that great love in my life.  On the other hand, I’m cool with the occasional bounce with a hot blonde—or hot any other hair color.  More on that later.  Hey, I may be a vampire, but I’m still a guy.

End of interview. 

Thanks me!  I ask the best questions! 

No problem, me.  Spectacular answers, me.

Who said an interview with a vampire can’t be fun?

Chapter 4

The commissary parking lot. The curb.  Sparky.  My lung inflating with the comfort of a barium enema expanding my intestines.  Fun.  I paused a moment to gather myself so I wouldn’t speak through gritted teeth.  Call it meaningless pride, but I still didn’t want Sparky to know how bad it hurt.

“Stay here,” I said.  “Gimme 30 minutes.”  Short sentences.  Perfect.

A hint of a grin on Sparky’s face—heck, I’m just being literary here.  More honest: I could practically see my reflection in both rows of his polished teeth.  The jerk.  We both knew I’d be at full speed in the next few minutes. If Sparky were smart, and he is about some things, he’d give not being here when I returned serious consideration.  But I was certain he’d be in the right seat of the Jaguar—it was a British version, of course—when I returned.  Everyone knows I can take a joke.  That’s probably why nobody’s shy about pulling them on me.

So I rolled my basket back down the emptying parking lot while I focused on lung regeneration.  Has a sentence like that ever passed your lips?  One advantage of working at a military facility: you never need worry about getting hit by a car.  With speed limits so low you practically need to get out and push your car to obey them, I could walk far enough off the curb to miss the rattle-spots of pavement.  Chattering metal wheels would represent the missing ingredient for making my aching chest a ten-egg omelet of agony.  I wasn’t in the mood. 

You’re familiar with “trouble follows so-and-so.”  Sparky’s got the copyright for that cliché.  That’s why the grand entrances, to get my mind off him showing up with whatever harebrained scheme—my father talking—and onto whatever he’s done to me—that would be the famous and wise voice of experience.  You’d no more care to hear all the ploys Sparky pulled in the past than I’d care to relive them.  Except maybe the tub of Neapolitan ice cream and the rampaging circus elephant.  That one took thought, timing, and execution.  Nothing like the knife in the back thing.  Done before.  Several times.  Little planning required. 

And that’s what bothered me most as discomfort from my chest moved aside and my head stepped up with the winning ticket for the pain lottery.  Sparky’s appearance seemed an impulse thing.  Another uh-oh.  Did I say trouble follows Sparky?  I’ll amend that.  Trouble doesn’t follow Sparky. He brings it along.  A flaming orange T flashed through my brain in tempo with my new headache.  I should have listened to my father.

But I hadn’t.  The glass doors slid open and I considered leaving my basket right along with the life I’d cobbled together in Germany. Turn and run.  Get out.  Get away.  Hop the train for Prague, disappear for a few weeks. Figure things out. I had nothing holding me back. 

Nothing besides a complete lack of spare identities. And at a time when sophisticated software made the best of fake identities difficult to maintain. Thanks Microsoft.  So lack of backup identity kept me from bolting out the back door past the Wiesbaden High School’s dormant football field and into the night—you can imagine a Transylvanian accent for that last phrase if you want. 

Two other things held me back.  Put emphasis on the word
things
.  You’ll get to meet those things soon.  I’m tempted to say I have two mouths to feed, but let’s just leave it at two things. I parked the basket and walked over to the other baggers.  That’s when Jesus spoke to me.

“Dude, you sure spend a lot of time with Zooper Roomble?”

Oh, and it’s pronounced hah-Zeus.  As in Jesus Rodriquez.  Don’t let the Hispanic accent fool you. Jesus doesn’t speak Spanish.  Jesus does however, speak English with a Spanish accent.  A fake Spanish accent of the sort you see in movies about inner-city gangs.  He thinks it gets him bigger tips.  When Jesus speaks to his friends, it’s usually in a West Texas twang.

“We worried, man.  We think maybe she seet on you to knock you out and put you body in her car when nobody looking, man.”

“Yo J-Rod,” I said.  “Nothing left to bag.

Jesus looked around and saw I was right about there being no more customers because he dropped the fake gangsta thing for his more natural Texas voice…if you can call anything from Texas natural.

“Gotcha,” Jesus said.  And then, “You were gone longer than it takes.”

I nodded.

“And what’s that on your jacket?”

Uh oh.
 

I nodded again and this time I added a smile.

“Nice Chinese tourist imitation.” 

He grabbed my jacket by the shoulder and spun me halfway around.
Ah…knife…ah…back
.  And I forgot about the hole in my jacket and of-freakin’-course, the blood.

J-Rod stared for a second and my brain kicked into high gear.  As usual, that didn’t help.  I don’t have an aversion to lying.  It’s just impossible for me to lie
well
.  My problem has nothing to do with manly honesty but more an inability to keep a lie compact.  Think of it this way: if a good lie is a stick figure of a dog, my version would be an ornately-carved gargoyle sitting on a life-sized replica of Notre Dame.  The truth doesn’t take long to make up.  A lie from me takes forever.  I always get caught.

“When the hell did that happen?” J-Rod asked. 

Good thing about guys, they don’t notice much about someone else’s clothes unless said clothes happen to include a string bikini.  In that case we can identify the knots.  My jacket?  Probably not.  All I needed to do was make up a time it happened.  The blood hadn’t dried, so whatever I made up had to have happened immediately prior to my run with Super Rumble.  I couldn’t look at the clock, though.  How do you spell obvious?

Still sporting that Chinese smile, I fired up my fib machine. Comet collides with earth?  Too simple.  Water from melting snow found its way to a train track causing some electronic component to…

“It fell off his basket and the shuttle bus ran over it,” said Sarah Arias.

Sarah Arias.  Speaking for me.  I could have dropped dead then and felt my life well lived.  I mean, Sarah Arias was the most the most gorgeous thing to ever hump groceries for tips.  The shock that she’d get involved in the petty goings-on between J-Rod and me? It would be like Helen of Troy inviting you on a long boat ride.  Only I suspect Helen of Troy would’ve looked a bit plain compared to our Sarah Arias. 

Think I’m exaggerating?  I call your attention to exhibit 1: J-Rod’s face and the kind of stone-faced astonishment popular on Easter Island. A thousand-yard stare, the slight bit of drool at the slackened right corner of his mouth.  But I had problems of my own.  Did someone just use a fire hose to inject a keg of BOTOX into my face?  Because I was fairly certain I’d regrown my lips and eyebrows before I hit the door.  But no feeling at all registered on my face.  Was I also doing the J-Rod drool? 

My luck.  The first time Sarah Arias says something meaningful—she did kind of lie to keep me out of trouble, I think.  The first time she speaks to me and all I can do is look back like a steer staring through a barb-wired fence.

But it worked.  J-Rod forgot all about me and my bloody jacket.  Me? I used the self-control honed in hundreds of dicey situations to clear the mental fireworks touched off by the sound of Sarah Arias’s voice to stem the tightening in my jeans.

I know some of you ladies out there are thinking, “Would the pig really think about bedding a girl for speaking a single sentence?”

Pig?  That’s over the top and you should be ashamed of yourself for thinking that about me.  But yes.  Sarah Arias talks, predictable things happen.  And I liked it.  What I didn’t like was the way Sarah glanced at me like she could read my thoughts, like she’d opened a private, one-way telepathy channel between the two of us.  Interesting, but I
do
work with her at least three shifts a week.  And the stuff I think when she’s around?

So what about my dear dead wife Nellie and all that about no more relationships? 

What about who? 

Just kidding. 

A relationship with Sarah Arias is an impossibility for a guy like me.  A sophomoric crush bordering on unhealthy obsession?  Totally possible.  That would make me identical to everyone who worked in the Wiesbaden Commissary.  Same for non-employees, customers, and seeing-eye dogs.  Enough talk of other guys.

Sarah Arias and I finally made contact and all I could manage was a dumbfounded stare as my blood migrated from my primary brain to the alternate command post. So much for self-control.  I managed a step toward her.  J-Rod remained behind like a bag of frozen corn.

Her sweet smell was as faint as it was indescribable.  I’ve used many languages through the years and can assure you there’s no combination of words to adequately relay that agonizingly thin wisp of heaven she exuded.  As far as the tobacco odor radiating off her body?  Easier.  I’d call that Essence of Humid, Smoky Wheelhouse in a Greek Fishing Boat. Not entirely appealing.  Yes, our mysterious and beautiful Sarah Arias smoked more in a day than an entire NASCAR pit crew.  As the hair-band Poison once pointed out: “Every rose has its thorn.” 

The smoking thing represented one of those lyrical thorns and certainly the most visible. Experience told me relationships weave whole nests of thorns.  Did I really care to search for those hidden beneath the surface?  Let me think.  Heck yes.  She didn’t step back at my approach—like most women do lately—but instead glanced away for a second and then back at me. Was she gathering courage to speak?  I wish. 

Nothing ventured, nothing gained.  I stopped just outside arm’s reach and said: “Would you like to…”

“No,” she said, and she looked hard into my eyes for a second, and then turned to walk away.  I could swear that look said she could read me like a comic book.

“Go out for a beer with the gang?” I continued as Our Lady of 3-Packs a Day turned her back on us and walked through the automatic doors. First came the literal knife in the back, and next a virtual knife in the heart.  Perfect symmetry.  What else could happen in the last thirty minutes of my shift?  I didn’t want to know.

The automatic doors swished shut with Sarah Arias on the other side.  That broke the spell for J-Rod and he managed to close his mouth.  We both stood for a second and watched as she pulled a cigarette from behind her ear and lit it up with a weather-proof lighter of some sort.  I think she knew we were both staring because she turned her back in what seemed a very intentional way.  But maybe all the literal and metaphorical knives flying around made me a bit over-sensitive.

“You asked her out?” J-Rod asked. 

I couldn’t tell for sure whether it was admiration or horror I saw on his face.  Ok.  I admit.  He was smiling a little.  No.  He was smiling big time. 

“No,” I said.  “I thought maybe she’d like to know about our Friday night team event.”

Did I mention I’m a terrible liar?

“You ask her out, dude.”  An accusation in the fake gang-banger accent.

“Did not.”  I said.  And then, “think we could just keep this between us?” 

Total waste of breath.

“Hey y’all,” J-Rod announced as we returned to the gang.  West Texas again.

“Gare just asked out Sarah.” 

Everyone stopped what they were doing and stared.  I could have sworn I heard Pops break his rhythm with the electronic checkout beeps.  Great.  Oh and yes, you heard him correctly.  Gare.

I try to stay as close to my original name, Gaius Teutoberg, as I can.  I purchased Gay Teutoberg from a mafia identity guy in 1947 Chicago.  By 1977, I realized it was a colossal mistake.  I would hit a nice downtown Chicago bar looking for the company of a pretty face.  Invariably, Sparky would pick the high-tide mark of a loaded happy-hour to walk in and yell, “Hi there, Gay Tooter.”  Needless to say, my sex life suffered.  I happily killed off the Gay Teutoberg identify in 1982. 

The police hauled me in for questioning when my idiot landlord reported Gay Teutoberg missing. Lucky for me that Sparky found an interim identity for me as my own nephew.  Double lucky  I’d let myself age from the 1940’s, so when I did cellular repair back to a 20-year-old body and nobody recognized me, though I think that Snoopy Sally landlord had her doubts. 

My latest identity: Garrett Teutoberg.  Hence Gare.  That’s what J-Rod called me and that’s who our little bagger clique wanted to hear from.  Schadenfreude tendrils floated so thickly that I felt I needed to part them like bamboo curtains.

“I only told her about Friday beers.”

“Like hell,” J-Rod drawled in full Texas mode.

My humiliation came out sounding like this: “LACK HALE.”  Ricardo Montalban’s great-great-grandson as played by Goober Pyle.  I reconsidered my aversion to feeding on people.

Three sets of eyes belonging to people I haven’t introduced—Vince McDonald, David Smith, and Sister Christian—stared back at me.  It warmed my heart to see the disbelief, like I couldn’t sink to such depths of buffoonery.  I thought I caught the bald back of Pops’ head staring too.  But that might have been scabs from where he cut himself shaving. 

Defending yourself to this crowd is admitting guilt.  I had Sparky waiting outside with whatever scheme I would regret participating in percolating between his clever ears.  Not saying I was anxious to dive into Sparky’s plots, just saying I had things to do and this pimple on the face of my personal vanity would not go away until I pinched all the poison out of it.